OpenAI's Orion: Ambitious AI Project Faces Delays and Surging Costs
1min read Recent reports suggest that OpenAI's development of its next major model, GPT-5, is facing significant delays, with costs escalating beyond initial expectations. Multiple sources confirm that the progress on GPT-5 is lagging well behind its original timeline, and the results thus far do not justify the enormous financial expenditure involved.
It's been revealed that OpenAI has conducted at least two large-scale training runs aimed at enhancing the model's capabilities through extensive data exposure. However, the initial training sessions have proceeded at a slower pace than anticipated, suggesting that future, larger-scale runs could require even more time and incur substantial additional costs. While there is evidence that GPT-5's performance surpasses that of its predecessors, the improvements may not be sufficient to validate the extensive resources being invested.
In addition to utilizing publicly available data sources under licensing agreements, OpenAI is innovatively creating new data by hiring individuals to generate novel code and solve mathematical problems. Moreover, the use of another model, referred to as o1, for generating synthetic data is part of OpenAI's strategy to expand the dataset for training GPT-5.
The code name "Orion" has been disclosed for GPT-5, and the model has undergone 18 months of development. Staff members who tested this model have indicated that, although its performance exceeds that of OpenAI’s current offerings, the improvement isn't as pronounced as the leap experienced from GPT-3 to GPT-4. This has led to discussions within the AI community about whether advancements in AI might be slowing down.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly acknowledged the complexity of managing resources for increasingly sophisticated AI projects, especially in light of computational resource challenges. OpenAI has indicated there will be no launch of the GPT-5 model this year, as the organization redirects its focus and recalibrates its strategy to overcome these developmental hurdles.
