LOS ANGELES — OpenAI on Thursday released the fifth generation of the artificial intelligence technology that powers ChatGPT, a product update that’s being closely watched as a measure of whether generative AI is advancing rapidly or hitting a plateau.

GPT-5 arrives more than two years after the March 2023 release of GPT-4, bookending a period of intense commercial investment, hype and worry over AI’s capabilities.

In anticipation, rival Anthropic released the latest version of its own chatbot, Claude, earlier in the week, part of a race with Google and other competitors in the U.S. and China to leapfrog each other on AI benchmarks. Meanwhile, longtime OpenAI partner Microsoft said it will incorporate GPT-5 into its own AI assistant, Copilot.

Expectations are high for the newest version of OpenAI’s flagship model because the San Francisco company has long positioned its technical advancements as a path toward artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a technology that is supposed to surpass humans at economically valuable work.

It is also trying to raise huge amounts of money to get there, in part to pay for the costly computer chips and data centers needed to build and run the technology.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described the new model as a “significant step along our path to AGI” but mostly focused on its usability to the 700 million people he says use ChatGPT each week.

“It’s like talking to an expert — a legitimate PhD-level expert in anything, any area you need, on demand,” Altman said at a launch event livestreamed Thursday.

It may take some time to see how people use the new model — now available, with usage limits, to anyone with a free ChatGPT account. The Thursday event focused heavily on ChatGPT’s use in coding, an area where Anthropic is seen as a leader, and featured a guest appearance by the CEO of coding software maker Cursor, an important Anthropic customer.

OpenAI’s presenters also spent time talking about safety improvements to make the chatbot “less deceptive” and stop it from producing harmful responses to “cleverly worded” prompts that could bypass its guardrails. The Associated Press reported Wednesday on a study that showed ChatGPT was providing dangerous information about drugs and self-harm to researchers posing as teenagers.

At a technical level, GPT-5 shows “modest but significant improvements” on the latest benchmarks, but when compared to GPT-4, it also looks very different and resets OpenAI’s flagship technology in a way that could set the stage for future innovations, said John Thickstun, an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University.

“I’m not a believer that it’s the end of work and that AI is just going to solve all humanity’s problems for it, but I do think there’s still a lot of headroom for them, and other people in this space, to continue to improve the technology,” he said. “Not just capitalizing on the gains that have already been made.”

OpenAI started in 2015 as a nonprofit research laboratory to safely build AGI and has since incorporated a for-profit company with a valuation that has grown to $300 billion. The company has tried to change its structure since the nonprofit board ousted Altman in November 2023. He was reinstated days later.

It has not yet reported making a profit but has run into hurdles escaping its nonprofit roots, including scrutiny from the attorneys general in California and Delaware, who have oversight of nonprofits, and a lawsuit by Elon Musk, an early donor to and founder of OpenAI who now runs his own AI company.

Most recently, OpenAI has said it will turn its for-profit company into a public benefit corporation, which must balance the interests of shareholders and its mission.

OpenAI is the world’s third most valuable private company and a bellwether for the AI industry, with an “increasingly fragile moat” at the frontier of AI, according to banking giant JPMorgan Chase, which recently made a rare decision to cover the company despite it not being publicly traded.

The inability of a single AI developer to have a “sustained competitive edge” could increasingly force companies to compete on lowering the prices of their AI products, the bank said in a report last month.

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