*

GPT-5's early testers impressed with its coding and

problem-solving abilities

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Challenges include data limitations and hardware-induced

failures during training

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OpenAI invests in 'test-time compute' for complex tasks,

says

CEO Altman

By Anna Tong

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 6 (Reuters) - OpenAI's GPT-5, the

latest installment of the AI technology that powered the ChatGPT

juggernaut in 2022, is set for an imminent release, and users

will scrutinize if the step up from GPT-4 is on par with the

research lab's previous improvements.

Two early testers of the new model told Reuters they have

been impressed with its ability to code and solve science and

math problems, but they believe the leap from GPT-4 to GPT-5 is

not as large as the one from GPT-3 to GPT-4. The testers, who

have signed non-disclosure agreements, declined to be named for

this story.

OpenAI declined to comment for this story.

GPT-4's leap was based on more compute power and data,

and the company was hoping that "scaling up" in a similar way

would consistently lead to improved AI models.

But OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft ( MSFT ) and is

currently valued at $300 billion, ran into issues scaling up.

One problem was the data wall the company ran into, and OpenAI's

former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever said last year that while

processing power was growing, the amount of data was not.

He was referring to the fact that large language models are

trained on massive datasets that scrape the entire internet, and

AI labs have no other options for large troves of

human-generated textual data.

Apart from the lack of data, another problem was that

'training runs' for large models are more likely to have

hardware-induced failures given how complicated the system is,

and researchers may not know the eventual performance of the

models until the end of the run, which can take months.

OpenAI has not said when GPT-5 will be released, but the

industry expects it to be any day now, according to media

reports. Boris Power, head of Applied Research at OpenAI, said

in an X post on Monday: "Excited to see how the public receives

GPT-5."

"OpenAI made such a great leap from GPT-3 to GPT-4, that

ever since then, there has been an enormous amount of

anticipation over GPT-5," said Navin Chaddha, managing partner

at venture capital fund Mayfield, who invests in AI companies

but is not an OpenAI investor. "The hope is that GPT-5 will

unlock AI applications that move beyond chat into fully

autonomous task execution."

'TEST-TIME COMPUTE'

Nearly three years ago, ChatGPT introduced the world to

generative AI, dazzling users with its ability to write

humanlike prose and poetry, quickly becoming one of the fastest

growing apps ever.

In March 2023, OpenAI followed up ChatGPT with the release

of GPT-4, a large language model that made huge leaps forward in

intelligence. While GPT-3.5, an earlier version of the model,

received a bar exam score in the bottom 10%, GPT-4 passed the

simulated bar exam in the top 10%.

GPT-4 then became the model to beat and the world came to

terms with the fact that AI models could outperform humans in

many tasks.

Soon, other companies were catching on. The same year,

Alphabet's Google and Anthropic - which is backed by

Amazon ( AMZN ) and Google - released competitive models to

GPT-4. Within a year, open-source models on par with GPT-4 such

as Meta Platforms' ( META ) Llama 3 models were released.

Along with training large models, OpenAI has now invested in

another route, called "test-time compute," which channels more

processing power to solve challenging tasks such as math or

complex operations that demand human-like reasoning and

decision-making.

The company's CEO Sam Altman said earlier this year that

GPT-5 would combine both test-time compute and its large models.

He also said that OpenAI's model and product offerings had

become "complicated."

(Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco; Editing by Sayantani

Ghosh and Muralikumar Anantharaman)