ChatGPT isn’t getting big upgrades anytime soon

Popular chatbot ChatGPT isn’t set to be getting any major new features or versions in the immediate future.

According to OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, the company is not training GPT-5, which would be the successor to GPT-4 that powers ChatGPT, that comes counter to reports that GPT-5 was being worked on and would be coming in the not-too-distant future. Put simply, it looks like ChatGPT isn’t going to be getting any major new upgrades or versions in the near future, according to its developers.

Altman’s comments came, in part, in response to a recently released open letter about AI from tech leaders that asked AI companies like OpenAI to temporarily pause the development of AI systems that could be “more powerful than ChatGPT.” According to Altman, “We are doing other things on top of GPT-4 that I think have all sorts of safety issues that are important to address that was totally left out of the letter.”

Both the open letter as well as Altman’s comments, though, are referring to the same worry: the idea that AI tools like ChatGPT have come into existence so quickly that both the developers of these technologies as well as the world at large haven’t had the time to fully understand the power of AI or the possible dangers it poses. Accordingly, taking a step back from aggressively updating and innovating on AI tech seems like a decent choice for the time being.

Of course, there’s more to AI than just Sam Altman, OpenAI, and ChatGPT, and even if ChatGPT doesn’t get any major upgrades anytime soon, it’s certainly an inevitability that AI tech is being worked on behind the scenes whether any of us like it or not. The AI genie is probably not going back into the bottle, but hopefully, we can at least prevent the robot uprising from happening in the next few years.