OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently hinted at the company's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT plans for future iterations, comparing the rise of AI to industrial-era developments and attempting to reassure an anxious public that the developers of cutting-edge AI applications are taking into account their worries.

Speaking last week alongside Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky at the 20th Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, Altman told the moderator, NBC News Lester Holt, that the development of increasingly advanced AI is "inevitable."

AI is going to change the way people use the internet, Altman said. The most recent ChatGPT model, GPT-4o, is already "way better than I thought it would be at this point."

"We think about it as this series of thresholds where the systems get better and better capabilities," Altman said. "You can use ChatGPT today for some things and you'll be able to use it for much more helpful tasks in the future."

Guiding Principles

Altman acknowledged during the panel that many people feel "anxious" about the advancements in AI, but said that large-language models (LLMs) like GPT are being increasingly integrated into other consumer and business tech products, making those products better.

"There are people that use ChatGPT and you know when you're using that or not, but the number of people that are integrating AI into all of their services and taking our GPT-4 and other models that we have, it's sort of, like, lifting a lot of services."

He said that society and governments will both "have a role" in "drawing a line" around what is and is not allowed with AI, such as the increasingly hard-to-differentiate deep fakes produced by tools like OpenAI's image generators.

Altman spoke in front of lawmakers during a Senate Judiciary subcommittee panel in May of last year about regulating AI and the technology's potential for a "printing press moment."

"We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models," Altman said. "The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) doesn't have the capability right now."

OpenAI recently released a proposed framework called Model Spec, which sets out certain principles meant to guide future iterations of GPT and other LLMs. Among those principles are a baseline belief that AI models should benefit humanity and the end-user and abide by laws and social norms.

"That way people can at least tell if it's a bug or intentional when it does something that they do not like," Altman said. "Overtime, society can debate what those values are and we can adapt to it."

Despite apprehension around the speed of AI advancements, Altman still sees it as a gradual evolution.

"We need to learn how to make safe technology," he said. "We need to figure out how to build safe products, and that includes an ongoing dialogue with society."

The AI Race

In the nearly two years since ChatGPT first debuted to worldwide acclaim and wonder, a number of other companies have raced to create their own large-language models. Google, Meta, X (formerly Twitter), Microsoft and other big tech companies have released their own versions.

This week, CP Gurnani, an Indian entrepreneur, announced that a start-up in India was able to build an LLM for $5 million in five months, suggesting the technology is in something of an Industrial Revolution-era of cost efficiencies.

"I don't think of it as a race. I understand why that's a very compelling, dramatic way to talk about it," Altman said. "I think that there may be a race between nation-states at some point, but the companies that are developing this now, I think everyone feels the stakes, the need to get this right."

Altman said there are plenty of products that OpenAI has built but will not release to the public.

Remaking Industry

At the Aspen Ideas event, Brian Chesky, the Airbnb CEO and a longtime friend of Altman, said that while AI is often thought of as an "existential enigmatic thing," he sees it as a practical application for existing businesses, such as his own.

Airbnb has the potential of leaving a search input system to a product that "understands you better" and become a "matchmaker" with communities and experiences."

"But I think almost any industry can get remade with AI," Chesky said.

To that point, Altman noted how Color Health, an early detection and comprehensive cancer management company that works with the American Cancer Society, is now using GPT-4 for cancer screening and treatment plans.

GPT-4o, the latest iteration, is able to identify missing diagnostics and tailor plans that allow healthcare providers to make evidence-based decisions about cancer screenings and treatments.

Color Health has served over seven million patients so far.

"Maybe a future version will help discover cures for cancer," Altman said. "The impact we can have by building the tools is important. People are going to go use these tools to invent the future."

Other groundbreaking tools include OpenAI's new text-to-video service, Sora. A recently commercial for Toys'R'Us was almost entirely created with the program — no actors or sets necessary.

GPT-5

With ChatGPT-5, the next iteration of OpenAI's flagship product in development, Altman predicts an "impressive leap" that will allow one person to do way more than what they can with the model available now.

It took OpenAI about eight months to go from training GPT-4 to its public release, Altman said, in order to go through concerns and try out "unexpected" impacts. Future iterations of ChatGPT, with even more advanced capabilities, may take even longer to test.

Altman likened AI's current state to the early days of the iPhone. The first iPhone was essentially a combined cell phone and iPod, with some basic web navigation abilities. Today's iPhones are more like personal assistants (Apple recently announced it would integrate GPT into its new iOS for the first time.)

Similarly, today's version of ChatGPT is useful, but still make mistakes.

"I expect it to be a significant leap forward," Altman said of GPT-5. "A lot of the things that GPT-4 gets wrong, you know, can't do much in the way of reasoning, sometimes just sort of totally goes off the rails and makes a dumb mistake, like even a six-year-old would never make."

Altman said OpenAI is "taking the time to get it right" with the development of GPT-5 and address the shortcomings of GPT-4.

In May, the company revealed a GPT-4o, which was touted as being much faster, as well as more human, than the other ChatGPT iterations. It sets new standards for multilingual, audio and vision capabilities.

Altman said at a Stanford University lecture at the time that "GPT-4 is the dumbest model any of you will ever have to use."

"It's important to ship early and often and we believe in iterative deployment," Altman said. "If we go build [artificial general intelligence] in a basement and then the world is kind of blissfully walking blindfolded along, I don't think that makes us very good neighbors."

"That is the story of the world getting better," he said. "We make technology. People use it to build new things, express their creative ideas, and society improves."

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