OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman said ChatGPT is the dumbest thing ever and promises a massive investment in the future of AI.

Altman hosted a lengthy Q&A seminar at Stanford University this week during a discussion on the future of generative AI and chatbots, and was asked by host Stanford lecturer Ravi Bellani about the reported operating costs of GPT-3 and how they have increased for GPT-4 ...

Altman declined to confirm the actual costs of building and operating the model, but was asked about whether AI will continue to get more expensive and how sustainable it is in the long run.

The CEO said it is about providing competent tools and getting people to think about what to do with them. This suggests that he is not particularly interested in finances. This may explain why he was removed from the OpenAI Startup fund, the company's venture capital arm.

Bellani asks, "Will the costs continue to increase with each subsequent [version]? How do we make the most of it? I think it's a very good and very valuable thing to give people a really capable tool and let them figure out how they can use this to build their future." [Perhaps there is someone somewhere at OpenAI who is more business-minded than I am and is worried about how much we are spending, but I am a little different," he joked. He even admitted that the money is being spent on products that are no big deal.

When pressed about burning "$520 million in cash last year" to run the "phenomenal ChatGPT," Altman described the company's LLM as "mildly embarrassing at best."

"The GPT-4 is the dumbest model we will ever need to use again," Altman said.

"It's important to ship early and often, and we believe in iterative deployments. If we build AGI in our basements and the world walks around in a blur with blinders on, I don't think that makes us good neighbors," Altman added, suggesting that society will "co-evolve" with technology.

Later in the discussion, Altman suggested that "we can say with a high degree of scientific certainty right now that GPT 5 will be much smarter than GPT 4," and that GPT 6 will do the same, noting that this is the essence of AI development.

Still, we may not have to wait too long for major new developments from the company, as OpenAI will reportedly reveal a competitor to Google's search engine as early as next week.

As several X contributors have noted, this is closely tied to both Google's IO event on May 14 and the reveal of Apple's new iPad lineup on May 7.