ChatGPT-5 Release Date (Predictions)

ChatGPT launched publicly on November 30, 2022 and acquired 1 million users in just 5 days, making it the fastest-growing tech in history. (R)

ChatGPT is well-liked for various reasons: efficiency (quick answers without visiting websites), personalization (responses tailored to user based on past interactions), novelty & FOMO (everyone wants to try new tech), & convenience (no need to wait for human support).

Just 3.47 months (3 months 14 days) after the release of GPT-3, OpenAI unveiled GPT-4 (March 14, 2023) – and the upgrade was significant in terms of total parameters, dataset, and overall performance.

The noticeable improvement in performance in such short order had me wondering when OpenAI will release GPT-5 – so I did some basic research re: GPT-5 release date predictions.

GPT-5 release date (Predictions)

As of March 2023, there are predictions for the release of GPT-5 – despite the fact that GPT-4 was just released… people keep looking forward.

Listed below are predictions for the release of GPT-5 made by: GPT-4 (with information I fed it), Metaculus (community), and Reddit (a simplistic poll).

GPT-5 Features (Hypothesized)

It is predicted that GPT-5 will have 10-20-fold more compute power than GPT-4, 10 trillion parameters (10-fold more than GPT-4), and might be able to pass the Turing test.

For reference, the Turing test is a test designed by Alan Turing intended to evaluate a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of humans.

• Compute power: 10-20x (~15x likely) of GPT-4
• Parameters: 10 trillion (10x GPT-4) (?)
• Turing test: Might be able to pass
• Hallucinations: <10% of answers
• MMLU benchmark: 90-95%
• Data: Higher quality & greater amount
• Thinking types: Big picture & detail oriented
• Long-term memory
• Improved reasoning & math
• Solves problems with greater complexity
• Codeforces: 30^th percentile
• Leetcode: 50%+ medium

Some researchers have stated that GPT-3 has way more parameters than it needs – and the major progress bottleneck is data, specifically “high-quality data.”

If this is the case, then GPT-5 may not really need 10 trillion parameters… instead it probably just needs more high-quality training data (the #1 commodity) – and may be subject to re-training with preexisting high-quality data (something that apparently hasn’t been done & would be expensive, but could be worth it).

For this reason, some think that GPT-5 may have the same or fewer parameters as GPT-4.

Think about how good GPT-4 is… and imagine better in most categories, performance, etc. – this will be GPT-5.

Some believe that it’ll take: (A) 6+ months of training AND (B) an additional 6-8 months of testing & refinement –before GPT-5 is released.

Knowing this, most predict that GPT-5 will roll out sometime between 2024 & 2026 (most project: late 2024-early 2025).

GPT-5 mentioned in Morgan Stanley report (February 10, 2023)

Context on the NVIDIA Chat GPT opportunity – and ramifications of large language model enthusiasm

We think that GPT-5 is currently being trained on 25k GPUs – $225 mm or so of NVIDIA hardware – and the inference costs are likely much lower than some of the numbers we have seen.

Further reducing inference costs will be critical in resolving the “cost of search” debate from cloud titans.

That being said, we think the broadening enthusiasm for large language models is a very important development for the longer term prospects of deep learning models for natural language, and we are not trying to be curmudgeons on the opportunity.

But we have talked to several industry participants about these workloads and do think we have some important context.

Out first instinct when the ChatGPT enthusiasm started to build was that this is not new, but our views have changed and we do think this can drive an inflection in the usage model for generative AI.

GPT-4 predicting GPT-5 release date…

I used GPT-4 to predict the release of GPT-5 based on relevant information.

Method: I input GPT release history, Metaculus prediction data, and relevant/related news I could find about GPT-5 (e.g. Morgan Stanley report) into GPT-4. Then I asked it to predict a release date for GPT-5.

Answer: “Based on the information provided & considering the predictions from Metaculus & Morgan Stanley, it seems likely that OpenAI will announce and release GPT-5 between September 2024 & February 2025.”

Here is the logic behind this prediction:

1. Morgan Stanley’s report from February 10, 2023 suggests that GPT-5 is already being trained on 25K GPUs, indicating that the development process is underway.
2. The Metaculus community predictions provide a range of potential release dates with the lower 25% predicting March 2024, the median predicting September 2024, and the upper 75% predicting February 2025.
3. Since GPT-4 was completed in August 2022, it seems reasonable to assume that OpenAI would need at least a couple of years to develop, train, and evaluate GPT-5. This aligns with September 2024 median prediction from Metaculus.
4. Taking into account continuous improvement in hardware and the ambitious goals set for GPT-5 (10-20x the compute power of GPT-4 & 10 trillion parameters), it seems plausible that OpenAI would require a significant amount of fine-tuning, pushing the release closer to the upper range of Metaculus predictions.

Metaculus prediction for GPT-5 release…

The Metaculus community predicts the announcement of GPT-5 on September 2, 2024. (R)

This is based on 71 total predictions & 43 total forecasters (as of late March 2023).

These predictions are subject to future fluctuation with the release of new information about GPT-5 (many will wait as long as possible to make predictions to increase accuracy).

• Lower 25%: May 2024
• Median: September 2024
• Upper 75%: February 2025

More than 96% of Metaculus users think that GPT-5 will arrive by May 15, 2026 (~3.4% think otherwise).

The Metaculus community evaluated the evolution of GPT (GPT -> GPT-2 -> GPT-3 -> GPT-4), OpenAI announcements, technical reports on GPT-4 (training ended August 2022), and the Morgan Stanley report (Feb 10, 2023).

How accurate was Metaculus in predicting GPT-4?

As of January 31, 2023, there were 109 predictions & 71 forecasters on Metaculus for the announcement of GPT-4 – and at the time, most predicted a release of GPT-4 in May 2023.

The longer the wait between prediction and actual announcement, the higher the accuracy due to insider leaks of information about GPT-4 release, etc. – such that the final community prediction (391 predictions & 129 forecasters) was March 18, 2023 (off by 4 days).

Basically all of the turbo IQs predicted early on that GPT-4 would be announced by the end of 2023 – and most figured it would arrive prior to May 2023… they were correct.

Based on Metaculus prediction accuracy for GPT-4, I assume the Metaculus experts will predict GPT-5 with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

As of March 2023, there are 71 total predictions & 43 forecasters – with the community prediction for GPT-5 announcement set as September 2, 2024.

Approx. 96.6% of the Metaculus community (nearly everyone) predicts that GPT-5 will arrive prior to May 2026.

Matthew Barnett predicted GPT-4…

Matthew Barnett (@MatthewJBar) made a prediction on December 21, 2022 about the respective releases of GPT-3.5 & GPT-4. (R)

“GPT-3.5 was reportedly finished training in early 2022. Since I estimated that GPT-4 could be trained for up to 12 months, and they likely need to fine-tune and test it, my guess is that we’re looking at a release in the early months of 2023, with maybe a median of March.”

I examined his Twitter posts to determine whether he made a GPT-5 release prediction – but nothing yet.

Reddit predicts GPT-5 release date…

In the Reddit community “r/Singularity,” a poll was posted asking members when they expect the release of GPT-5.

The poll had options of years (2024, 2025, 2026, 2027, 2028) – so the predictions aren’t ultra-specific (e.g. October 15, 2024).

Additionally, the poll results are not based on expert opinions or technical information – some are probably just answering with their “gut”-shot opinion (not making any attempt to predict using data or logic).

This poll provides insight into expectations of GPT-5 release from a tech-focused cohort of the general public.

This poll was closed after 1,425 votes – polling took place: March 16-19, 2023.

Based on the results, most Redditors predict GPT-5 to be released in 2024 (~57%) followed by 2025 (~28%).

Fewer than 15% of voters predict that GPT-5 will be released in 2026 or beyond.

Predicting a year is much easier than predicting a specific month or even quarter (e.g. Q3) – and it’s unknown as to how accurate forecasters are in “r/Singularity.”

History of GPT iterations

Below is some general information about the iterations of ChatGPT.

GPT-1 (2018)

• Parameters: 117 million
• Based on transformer architecture from “Attention is All You Need” (paper)
• Unsupervised pre-training & supervised fine-tuning
• Performed well in natural language processing tasks

GPT-2 (2019)

• Parameters: 1.5 billion
• Improved unsupervised pre-training with larger dataset (web-text)
• Improved performance on NLP benchmarks
• Higher coherency & contextually-relevant text

Improvements: Parameters, training methodology, NLP benchmarks, text generation

GPT-3 (2020-2022)

• Parameters: 175 billion
• Large dataset (websites, books, scientific articles, etc.)
• Near-human performance on NLP tasks (translation, summarization, question answering)
• Zero-shot & few-shot learning
• OpenAI API for GPT-3 allowing developers to build apps

Improvements: Parameters, NLP benchmarks, learning ability, API for devs

GPT-4 (2023)

• Parameters: 1 trillion
• Larger dataset (including images & text)
• Outperforms GPT-3 in 24 languages
• Improved few-shot learning abilities
• Improved comprehension of longer texts
• Improved accuracy (precision)

Improvements: Parameters, training dataset, NLP benchmarks, creativity, accuracy, etc.

GPT-5 (prediction: 2024)

• Parameters: 10 trillion
• Larger dataset
• Outperforms GPT-4
• Improved learning abilities
• Passes Turing test (or close)

Improvements: Parameters, training dataset, NLP benchmarks, creativity, accuracy, capabilities

When do you think GPT-5 will be released?

Unless you’re an insider, it may be challenging to accurately predict the release of GPT-5 – particularly at present date (March 2023).

Most people can probably make decent guesses based on currently-available information, estimated training time, estimated refinement time, etc.

I’m not some tech prediction guru – and my gut-shot prediction is that GPT-5 will be released sometime in 2024 (things seem to be moving at breakneck speed).

Those with a general understanding of the technology are projecting late 2024 to early 2025 for a GPT-5 debut.

GPT-4 was released slightly sooner than most predicted (if examining predictions well-in-advance of its release) – so perhaps GPT-5 will follow the trend.

What is your prediction for a release date of GPT-5 and how confident are you in this prediction? (Explain why you’re making this prediction)