OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said Wednesday that the company is not currently training GPT5 — the successor to GPT4.

Speaking at an event organised by The Economic Times in New Delhi, Altman said, “We have a lot of work to do before GPT5. It takes a lot of time. We are nowhere close to it’’.

He added, “We’re working on the new ideas that we think we need for it, but we are nowhere close to the start. There need to be more safety audits: I wish I could tell you about the timeline of the next GPT”.

Altman’s comments come amid growing concern among AI researchers and Big Tech executives regarding the alarming pace at which the technology is barrelling ahead. Many of them have called for a pause in training large language models that form the backbone of generative artificial intelligence (AI).

Also read | Five takeaways from Sam Altman’s conversation with ET

In March, Twitter CEO Elon Musk — one of the founders of OpenAI in 2015 — wrote a letter to the US Federal Trade Commission asking “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT4.”

The letter had more than 1,100 signatories, such as Steve Wozniak (co-founder of Apple), Swedish-American physicist and popular science writer Max Tegmark, and Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, among others.Altman, however, said most of them were missing the point.

“Most of them are missing the technical nuance about where we need the pause. I think moving with caution and increasing rigour for safety issues is really important. I don’t think the letter was the optimal way to address it,” Altman said at an MIT event in April, according to a report by CNBC.

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