In a recent interview, Mira Murati, OpenAI CTO, said that she herself doesn’t know exactly what in chatgpt 5 will be better than the current version. The word that has been creeping into my vocabulary is stochastic. It means inherently random and unpredictable. Very much like the responses you get from an LLM. You will often get a very helpful response, and it is amazing that it is generated in a matter of seconds. But sometimes you get unexpected results, sometimes harmful results. If you think about it, people aren’t that much different. It’s just that babies have had years of training on how to behave acceptably in society. Do you ever get random thoughts/impulses in your head? And then decide not to act on them? I think that’s kinda similar. Likewise, these LLMs need a bit more training for them to be acceptable and safe.

I think it’s fascinating that chatgpt 5 capabilities are very much unknown and yet there is a massive amount of engineering dedicated to it. My guess is that it is an improved algorithm or strategy of some sorts that showed promise in small scale prototyping. Or maybe it ends up not being a huge advance. If they can deliver on what they demo’ed for 4omni, that would be significant in itself. There’s still a lot of places where this raw technology has yet to be applied. And hopefully, some of that intelligence can find a more reasonable method of energy consumption . . .

I find it interesting that a new product version is being developed without very specific goals or success metrics, since the capabilities don’t seem to be fully defined. Product Management is a discipline where future capabilities are imagined and designed, feasibility is tested by research, design and user experience flow is refined and iterated, cost of goods are calculated, revenue impact is estimated, pricing models are structured and so forth. How can you do that if you don’t even know the new functionality of your product? So this chatgpt (5) is more like a raw technology than a product. Maybe one day in the future it will become like a utility, no different from water, electric and internet. Some day in the future – “Hey kids, Our AI tokens bill is really high this month. Can you stop generatively bio-engineering those crazy pets in the omniverse?”