Sam Altman said he ‘sometimes’ used ChatGPT to answer Reddit AMA questions

• Sam Altman said OpenAI’s next big model is likely not coming this year.
• The CEO answered user questions during a Reddit Ask Me Anything Thursday — sometimes using ChatGPT to respond, he said.
• The update comes as OpenAI faces increasing pressure from AI competitors.

Sam Altman used his own AI creation to answer questions during a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session on Thursday.

The OpenAI CEO answered Redditors’ wide-ranging questions on the social media platform, touching on the release date of the company’s next GPT model and current computing struggles at the research organization.

Altman also said he was using ChatGPT, the company’s generative AI chatbot, to “sometimes” answer questions during the AMA.

The billionaire offered new timing details on OpenAI’s next large AI model, GPT-5, saying its release likely won’t come this year.

“All of these models have gotten quite complex, and we can’t ship as many things in parallel as we’d like to,” Altman wrote, adding that the company is facing “limitations and hard decisions” about how to allocate computing resources toward several “great ideas.”

Altman said the company has “some very good releases coming later this year,” though nothing “we are going to call GPT-5.”

As competitors close in on OpenAI’s industry success, the pressure is on for Altman and other executives to release faster and better updates.

A wave of top-level departures in recent months has allowed other AI-focused startups to prowl for the company’s former talent.

OpenAI engineering vice president Srinivas Narayanan addressed the executive exits, saying the company was “sad to not have some of the people we had worked with closely.”

“We have an incredibly talented team and many new amazing people who have joined us recently as well,” Narayanan wrote. “And we keep shipping, which is really important.”

Despite an at-times rocky year for Altman, which included a brief ouster from the company last November, the CEO recently secured a historic $6.6 billion round of fundraising, giving OpenAI a valuation of $157 billion.

Altman’s Thursday AMA followed the launch of a new search feature in ChatGPT that works similarly to search engines like Google, Bing, and Perplexity. The CEO said the feature is his all-time favorite in a Thursday post on X.

Narayanan told Redditors that ChatGPT uses a set of search services behind the scenes, including Bing.

OpenAI execs also answered users’ questions about when to expect future models and features, like the video model Sora and image model DALL-E.

Product Chief Kevin Weil said the Sora model still needs to be perfected with accurate safety and impersonation features. The DALL-E, meanwhile, has no planned release as of yet, Altman said, adding that the next update will “be worth the wait.”