In a Reddit AMA with OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Kevin Weil, Srinivas Narayanan, and Mark Chen, Altman blamed compute scaling for the lack of newer AI models.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have been in an AI arms race, each one working to unlock the next major AI breakthrough. While OpenAI has continued to iterate on GPT-4, it no longer has a dominant lead, with Anthropic’s Claude going toe-to-toe with ChatGPT and besting it at times.

In the AMA, Altman was asked why the company has not yet released GPT-5.

we are prioritizing shipping o1 and its successors.

all of these models have gotten quite complex and we can’t ship as many things in parallel as we’d like to. (we also face a lot of limitations and hard decisions about we allocated our compute towards many great ideas.)

don’t have a date for AVM vision yet.

Compute and energy demands are increasingly becoming an issue for AI firms, threatening to derail many companies’ climate change commitments. Microsoft and Amazon have been investing in nuclear energy in an effort to meet those needs.

On OpenAI’s Leadership Exodus

Altman also addressed a question regarding OpenAI’s ongoing loss of some of its co-founders and top researchers.

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. And we keep shipping which is really important 🙂

On AI’s Ability to Change a Founder’s Role

Another user asked AI could be used to augment a founder’s role and entrepreneurship.

extremely excited about this!

if a founder can be 10x as productive, we will have a lot more (and better startups). this works better than having a founding team of 10 people in many ways (less coordination overhead, for example).

although a 10x productivity gain is still far in the future, i believe it will happen. the resulting economic acceleration in general, and for startups in particular, will be great.

The entire AMA provides quite a bit of insight into OpenAI and Sam Altman’s take on the AI field.