GPT-5: Key characteristics, pricing and system card

Completely agree. General intelligence is a building block. By chaining things together you can achieve meta programming. The trick isn't to create one perfect block but to build a variety of blocks and make one of those blocks a block-builder.

I wouldn't say model development and performance is "leveling off", and in fact didn't write that. I'd say that tons more funding is going into the development of many models, so one would expect performance increases unless the paradigm was completely flawed at it's core, a belief I wouldn't personally profess to. My point was moreso the following: A couple years ago it was easy to find people saying that all we needed was to add in video data, or genetic data, or some other data modality, in the exact same format that the models trained on existing language data were, and we'd see a fast takeoff scenario with no other algorithmic changes. Given that the top labs seem to be increasingly investigating alternate approaches to setting up the models beyond just adding more data sources, and have been for the last couple years(Which, I should clarify, is a good idea in my opinion), then the probability of those statements of just adding more data or more compute taking us straight to AGI being correct seems at the very least slightly lower, right?

Rather than my personal opinion, I was commenting on commonly viewed opinions of people I would believe to have been caught up in hype in the past. But I do feel that although that's a benchmark, it's not necessarily the end-all of benchmarks. I'll reserve my final opinions until I test personally, of course. I will say that increasing the context window probably translates pretty well to longer context task performance, but I'm not entirely convinced it directly translates to individual end-step improvement on every class of task.

By "performance" I guess you mean "the length of task that can be done adequately"?

It is a benchmark but I'm not very convinced it's the be-all, end-all.

I'd agree on that.

That's pretty much the key component these approaches have been lacking on, the reliability and consistency on the tasks they already work well on to some extent.

I think there's a lot of visions of what our human lives would look like in that world that I can imagine, but your comment did make me think of one particularly interesting tautological scenario in that commonly defined version of AGI.

If artificial general intelligence is defined as completed "economically valuable tasks" better than human can, it requires one to define "economically valuable." As it currently stands, something holds value in an economy relative to human beings wanting it. Houses get expensive because many people, each of whom have economic utility which they use to purchase things, want to have houses, of which there is a limited supply for a variety of reasons. If human beings are not the most effective producers of value in the system, they lose capability to trade for things, which negates that existing definition of economic value. Doesn't matter how many people would pay $5 dollars for your widget if people have no economic utility relative to AGI, meaning they cannot trade that utility for goods.

In general that sort of definition of AGI being held reveals a bit of a deeper belief, which is that there is some version of economic value detached from the humans consuming it. Some sort of nebulous concept of progress, rather than the acknowledgement that for all of human history, progress and value have both been relative to the people themselves getting some form of value or progress. I suppose it generally points to the idea of an economy without consumers, which is always a pretty bizarre thing to consider, but in that case, wouldn't it just be a definition saying that "AGI is achieved when it can do things that the people who control the AI system think are useful." Since in that case, the economy would eventually largely consist of the people controlling the most economically valuable agents.

I suppose that's the whole point of the various alignment studies, but I do find it kind of interesting to think about the fact that even the concept of something being "economically valuable", which sounds very rigorous and measurable to many people, is so nebulous as to be dependent on our preferences and wants as a society.

OpenAI and most AI companies do not train on data submitted to a paid API.

And it’s a massive distillation of the mother model, so the costs of inference are likely low.

But given the option, do you choose bigger models or more reasoning? Or medium of both?

Temperature is the response variation control?

The Information’s report from earlier this month claimed that GPT-5 was only developed in the last 1-2 months, after some sort of breakthrough in training methodology.

> As recently as June, the technical problems meant none of OpenAI’s models under development seemed good enough to be labeled GPT-5, according to a person who has worked on it.

But it could be that this refers to post-training and the base model was developed earlier.

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/inside-openais-rocky...

https://archive.ph/d72B4

No, this is below expectations on both Manifold and lesswrong (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FG54euEAesRkSZuJN/ryan_green...). Median was ~2.75 hours on both (which already represented a bearish slowdown).

Not massively off -- manifold yesterday implied odds this low were ~35%. 30% before Claude Opus 4.1 came out which updated expected agentic coding abilities downward.

It's not surprising to AI critics but go back to 2022 and open r/singularity and then answer: what "people" were expecting? Which people?

SamA has been promising AGI next year for three years like Musk has been promising FSD next year for the last ten years.

IDK what "people" are expecting but with the amount of hype I'd have to guess they were expecting more than we've gotten so far.

The fact that "fast takeoff" is a term I recognize indicates that some people believed OpenAI when they said this technology (transformers) would lead to sci fi style AI and that is most certainly not happening

The 2h 15m is the length of tasks the model can complete with 50% probability. So longer is better in that sense. Or at least, "more advanced" and potentially "more dangerous".

Wow, if so, 7x cheaper. Crazy if true.