Is Sam Altman just trying to get people to wonder to some small strawberries that he grew, or is it the OpenAI CEO (the team behind ChatGPT) teasing the next big upgrade to its chatbot?
This is what we ask ourselves after his last social media post showing a flower pot growing fruit, accompanied by the caption “I love summer in the garden.” From anyone else, this would be a pretty basic, if not boring, comment, but from Altman, many are taking this as a sign that OpenAI may soon be rolling out its next big update to ChatGPT, which leaks from earlier this year revealed the codename was “Strawberry”.
Currently, the best commercially available ChatGPT model is GPT-4o. Launched in May, ChatGPT has enabled LLM students to understand text, audio, image and video messages. It is also faster than previous versions and smarter. All this was shown in an online demo in which ChatGPT was able to translate a conversation in real time and help someone solve a math equation when shown an image, among other interesting tools.
However, you may know GPT-4o better as the voice update that was supposed to include a flirt Her-as a voice called Sky before the specific personality was removed – apparently in response to a lawsuit filed by the actress Scarlett Johansson who claimed Sky was based on her, which OpenAI denied despite Altman tweeting “Her” the very day GPT-4o was launched (directly matching the voices to the movie starring Johansson as an AI).
GPT-5, or whatever “Strawberry” is officially called, is supposedly improve the bot’s reasoning abilities (by Reuters). The hope is that this version of AI could operate more independently of a human; not only could it simply find an answer to a question, but it could also perform follow-up research — a major step toward more human-like AI that other companies have yet to launch.
Obviously, Altman’s post is nothing like 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 reaching out to people desperate to try Strawberry, or it could simply be a post about his garden. That said, Altman only posts about AI and ChatGPT, so a sudden photo of the garden is more than a little out of place, unless it means something more.
The only other evidence that indicates that it may be something more is Social media posts discussing an ‘anonymous chatbot’ that appeared in LMSYS Chatbot Arena. It allows people to see how two different models behave with the same prompt, and this new, unknown model presents itself as a refined version of GPT-4. Its appearance is considered a sign that some kind of announcement is on the way.
Yet another new model on the scene. It’s simply called “anonymous chatbot” this time. There’s already speculation that it’s Q*. Either way, something new is on the way. https://t.co/Zvpr2XUSxGAugust 7, 2024
OpenAI is most likely preparing an update to ChatGPT, it’s just a question of whether Altman’s post explicitly references this upcoming upgrade and whether it’s coming soon. There are certainly signs that it’s coming, but we wouldn’t recommend holding your breath.
If you’re desperate to see AI upgrades, your best bet will be to see what Google announcement for Gemini at his Made By Google event next week.
