OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says new AI model taking a while because ‘we can’t ship’ as quickly as hoped

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Thursday that his company’s next big AI model release likely won’t come this year as the company is “prioritizing shipping” of existing models that are focused on reasoning and difficult questions.

“All of these models have gotten quite complex and we can’t ship as many things in parallel as we’d like to,” Altman wrote during a Reddit AMA. He said the company faces “limitations and hard decisions” when it comes to allocating compute resources “towards many great ideas.”

A Reddit user asked Altman about the release date of GPT-5 or its equivalent. GPT is the company’s family of large language models. OpenAI released GPT-4 in March 2023.

Altman responded that OpenAI has “some very good releases coming later this year,” but “nothing that we are going to call GPT-5.”

The pressure is on for OpenAI to continue putting out faster and more efficient updates as rivals from internet giant Google to well-funded startups like Anthropic bolster their artificial intelligence models. OpenAI closed its latest funding round earlier this month at a valuation of $157 billion. The company expects about $5 billion in losses this year on $3.7 billion in revenue this year, CNBC confirmed in September.

Reddit users asked OpenAI executives about release dates for other new models and features, including Sora, which is the video-generation model, as well as a new version of image-generation model DALL-E, “camera mode” for ChatGPT and vision capabilities for Advanced Voice Mode (AVM) within ChatGPT.

After a questioner asked whether Sora was being delayed “due to the amount of compute/time required for inference or due to safety,” OpenAI product chief Kevin Weil wrote, “Need to perfect the model, need to get safety/impersonation/other things right, and need to scale compute!”

Regarding the next version of DALL-E, Altman wrote that the “next update will be worth the wait” but that there’s no “release plan yet.” He added there was also no current planned release date for AVM Vision. OpenAI’s engineering vice president, Srinivas Narayanan, wrote that there is no “exact release date” planned yet for ChatGPT’s camera mode either.

Earlier on Thursday, OpenAI launched a search feature within ChatGPT chatbot that positions it to better compete with search engines like Google, Microsoft‘s Bing and Perplexity.

ChatGPT search offers up-to-the-minute sports scores, stock quotes, news, weather and more, powered by real-time web search and partnerships with news and data providers, according to the company. It began beta-testing the search engine prototype, called SearchGPT, in July.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, Alphabet investors have been concerned that OpenAI could take market share from Google in search by giving consumers new ways to seek information online. The move also positions OpenAI as more of a competitor to Microsoft, which has invested close to $14 billion in OpenAI.

Narayanan answered a user question about whether ChatGPT search used Bing as the search engine behind the scenes, writing, “We use a set of services and Bing is an important one.”

In a post on X, Altman called search his “favorite feature we have launched” in ChatGPT since the chatbot’s original debut.

Another topic that came up in the Reddit discussion was OpenAI’s recent controversies regarding its upcoming transition to a for-profit structure, as well as a string of high-profile executive departures.

“While we are sad to not have some of the people we had worked with closely, we have an incredibly talented team and many new amazing people who have joined us recently as well,” Narayanan wrote in response to a question. “And we keep shipping which is really important.”

For Altman, Reddit isn’t just a communications platform. He’s a former board member and one of the biggest investors in the company, with a stake that swelled to almost $1.5 billion after Reddit’s better-than-expected earnings led to a 42% spike in its stock price on Wednesday and another 3.2% gain on Thursday.

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