Is Sam Altman just trying to get people to enjoy the few tiny strawberries he’s grown, or is the CEO of OpenAI (the team behind ChatGPT) teasing the next big upgrade to his chatbot?
That’s what we’re wondering after his last message on social media a plant pot with fruit in it, complete with the caption “I love summer in the garden.” From anyone else, this would be a fairly basic, even boring musing, but according to Altman, many are seeing this as a sign that OpenAI could soon launch its next major update to ChatGPT, which was leaked earlier this year as being codenamed “Strawberry.”
Currently, the best commercially available model of ChatGPT is GPT-4o. It was rolled out in May and allowed the LLM to understand text, audio, image, and video prompts. It is also faster than previous iterations and smarter. This was all demonstrated in an online demo where ChatGPT could translate a conversation in real time and help someone solve a mathematical equation when it was shown an image, among other useful tools.
While you may know GPT-4o better as the voice update that features a flirtatious Her-esque voice dubbed Sky before the specific personality was retracted – apparently in response to legal action taken by actress Scarlett Johansson who claimed Sky was based on her, something OpenAI denied, despite Altman tweeting “Her” on the same day as GPT-4o’s launch (and directly comparing the voices to the film starring Johansson as the AI).
GPT-5, or whatever ‘Strawberry’ is officially called, is said to improve the bot’s reasoning capabilities (according to Reuters). The hope is that this version of the AI could operate more independently of a human; not only could it simply find an answer to a question, but it could also do follow-up research — a big step toward more human-like AI that other companies have yet to release.
It’s clear that Altman’s post doesn’t amount to anything close to an official announcement. While it could be a teaser for Strawberry and a hint at an upcoming release, it could just as easily be Altman pestering people to try Strawberry, or just a post about his garden. That said, Altman only posts about AI and ChatGPT, so a sudden garden photo is more than a little out of character unless it means something more.
The only other evidence that suggests this might be a little more is social media posts discussing an ‘Anonymous chatbot’ which appeared in LMSYS Chatbot Arena. It allows people to see how two different models perform on the same prompt, and this new unknown model calls itself a refined version of GPT-4. Its appearance is seen as a sign that some sort of announcement is coming.
Another new model on arena. This time it’s just called ‘anonymous-chatbot’. There’s already speculation that this is Q*. Whatever it is, something new is coming. https://t.co/Zvpr2XUSxGAugust 7, 2024
OpenAI is almost certainly preparing an update for ChatGPT, the question is whether Altman’s post explicitly refers to that next upgrade, and whether it’s coming anytime soon. There are certainly signs that point to that, but we’d advise not holding your breath.
If you’re eager to see AI upgrades, you’ll want to watch what Google is announcing for Gemini next week at its Made By Google event.