OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap: GPT-5's Capabilities, Why It Matters, and Where AI Goes Next
Channel: Alex Kantrowitz
Published at: 2025-08-08
YouTube video id: vnvTCMDr0rc
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnvTCMDr0rc
GPT5 is here and OpenAI COO Brad Litecap is with us to break down the new model's capabilities, what it means for the AI business, and what's next for this promising technology. Brad, it's so great to see you. Thank you for joining us on an emergency episode of Big Technology Podcast. >> My pleasure. Thanks for having me. >> All right. So, briefly, I just want you to talk a little bit about what GPT5 is. So, maybe within like 60 seconds or so, can you talk about what it is and how it improves on previous OpenAI models? Yeah. So, GPT5 is uh it's our next generation flagship model. Um it does something really interesting which is it actually combines into one model the ability to dynamically choose uh whether to think hard about a problem and reason about it to give you an answer or not. And so you'll remember previously you had to go deal with the model picker in chatgpt everyone's favorite thing. Um you had to select uh a model that you wanted to use for a given task. Um, and then you'd run the process uh of asking a question, getting an answer. Sometimes you choose a thinking model, sometimes you wouldn't. Um, and that was, I think, a confusing experience for users. GPT5 abstracts all of that. So, it makes that decision for you. Uh, and it's actually a smarter model. So, um, you're going to get a better answer, uh, in all cases, regardless of whether you're using the thinking mode or not. Um, and it's vastly improved on things like writing, coding, uh, health. um it's much more accurate uh is much faster. Um and so all around we think a better experience. >> And now for those of us who've been following the hype, uh I think we probably imagine you would lead with this is an explosive increase in intelligence versus um there's a switcher on the model that will go to reasoning or non-reasoning when it makes the most sense. So can you explain like what the what's the disconnect there? Um and why lead with the usability versus the intelligence increase? Yeah, because intelligence really is a function of how much time the model is going to be thinking. And so depending on how much you want to allocate thinking time to a problem, you're going to get a better answer. Typically, the longer it thinks, uh, the better an answer it can give you. So when we test the model on, uh, certain benchmarks and eval, it will dramatically outperform any of our existing models by far. Um even though if you don't allow any thinking time uh you still get a typically net better answer than you would for one of our non-thinking models like GBT41. Um so it is a dramatic improvement in intelligence. Uh it should be I think a better quality model across pretty much all dimensions. Um but that reasoning time and being able to use the reasoning time dynamically to think uh we think actually is the important part. It makes it for a much better user experience. >> Now I'm going to parse your words a little bit. You said that it is a dramatic improvement over previous models. Sam in a press call said that GPT5 is a pretty significant step over 40. Simon Wilson uh who's been using your model for a little bit says it doesn't feel like a dramatic leap ahead from what other LLM from other LLMs, but it exudes confidence. It rarely messes up and frequently impresses me. Um, I'm just setting this up because I'm curious whether we could say or whether you would say that this model is an exponential increase in capabilities or an incremental increase in capabilities. >> You know, it's it's hard to measure it that way. I think we're now kind of into this regime of um having to measure intelligence across a lot of different dimensions. Um, which isn't a way to dodge the question so much as it is to explain why GBT5 is such a special model. Um, and so obviously it's better at the core things that you'd expect it to be better at. It scores better on things like Swebench. Uh, it scores better on all the kind of academic evals that we put it through. Um, this one in particular, we actually made a real emphasis uh to have it score better on certain health benchmarks. So it's better at medical reasoning and other health rellated things. Um, but there's a lot of things that go into what makes a model good now because you have a lot of dimensions to play with depending on kind of how that model's trained and how it can think about problems. So um if it's faster for example, we think that's actually uh indicative of it being better. If it can give you a better answer per unit of time thinking, we think that's a an improvement that um is an important vector to measure. Also, um if it can do things like uh structured thinking, problem solving, tool use, um all these things are things we actually measure and they're kind of invisible to users. You know, if if you're just using chat GPT, you don't necessarily appreciate each of these things happening under the hood. But all those things are better for GPT5 than they were for our previous models. >> Right? And the reason why I'm asking is because I think a lot of people have pointed to the leaps from GPT, original GPT to GPT2, GPC2 to GPT3, GPT3 to GPT4. And one of the things people have seen is just a general increase in capabilities across the board. There were no caveats of like um and maybe there's a reason for those caveats, but there were no caveats of you know there's uh intelligence increases in this place and that place it was we trained a bigger model. I'm pretty sure this is what it was and it's better across the board. So have things changed? They've changed. Yeah, from a technical perspective, I think when you go from GBT2 to GBT3, 3 to 4, these were really just uh exploits of what was uh and is the scaling paradigm of training larger pre-training bigger and bigger models, training larger models. Um it's kind of one vector of training. Uh and you get a better model that uh as a as a result. Um, and that continues to hold true, but we now have this kind of other category of of of training, which is post-training. Uh, and being able to use test time compute in more interesting ways than we used to as almost kind of a second stage of training. And so we think that that actually gives us a little bit of a boost um, a force multiplier on our ability to push the model toward new intelligence levels um, and also be able to train into it a lot of the things that you want an intelligent model to be able to do. Um so using tools for example is something that we think is really important uh for overall intelligence. GBT2 and 3 um couldn't really do that as well. GBT4 could do it in a more nent way. Um and now GBT5 you get that baked in uh with the benefit of of these kind of multi- multi-step and and longer horizon reasoning processes. So um yeah we we want to abstract that from users. Obviously we don't think that you as a a chatbt user should have to stop and think about that. And in some sense, I think the model picker being a point of frustration for people was an expression of the fact that people don't necessarily want to have to make those decisions every time they talk to an AI model. Um, they kind of want the model to make those decisions for them. And so that's why we think GPT5 is a big step. >> And going back to that increasing uh pre-training, increasing the scale of pre-training, delivering predictable improvements in model performance. Um, yes, now post- training is in the picture. making models better in really impressive ways. Um, but are you of the belief and is open AI of the belief now that there are diminishing returns from pre-training? Um, given that we're now talking about different forms of training these models, >> not at all. Um, our scaling laws still hold. Uh, empirically, there's no reason to believe that there's any kind of diminishing return uh on pre-training and on post-training. We're really just starting to scratch the surface of of that new paradigm. um you know the the O series of models which were kind of the previous reasoning models um were really just the beginning of uh us starting to explore what's possible in that post-training regime and I think that's going to be kind of the dominant theme here for the next year or two um is continuing to scale in that dimension uh and continuing to see the gains that you get there um simply because they're so significant uh and so now we're pushing on two axes for how to improve models and we think that's going to tighten and condense the rate of of of innovation >> this is opening I believe that the vast majority of improvements from here are going to be coming from scaling or from algorithms >> I think it'll be a combination >> it's always a combination right um it's it's always algorithms uh uh scale uh compute and and data right and so um we we push on all three um and they all play a really important role I think in uh in how we look at the future um and then the hard part obviously is having them come together. So being able to train larger models requires typically that you want to train on more data obviously with more compute. Um and so that's a delicate balance between those things because just scaling up doesn't necessarily mean uh you know in all cases that you're going to get kind of the the same uh you know corresponding rate of improvement. You have to be able to bring uh those other pieces also. So um it's not like we push one button or the other. We we actually make a really conscientious effort to try and kind of pull all those of those together. Okay. And you're not calling it AGI. And I have to say I've lost a bet on this show because I was listening to Sam on the Theo Von show. He says he said GPT5 is smarter than us in almost every way. And I said, "All right, well that sounds like what you would imagine AGI would be." And then, you know, G GPT5 comes out yesterday or as the release happens. Sam says, "I kind of hate the term AGI because everyone at this point uses it to mean a slightly different thing, but this is clearly a model that is generally intelligent." Help me understand what's going on. Uh because it seems like maybe maybe he wants to call it AGI, but you're not yet. So why is this not AGI? >> Well, it is it is a hard thing to define. um you know you ask the joke here is you ask five people what AGI is you'll get seven answers um and I think the way we kind of look at it is it's a cumulative process right it's a system um and I think you have to define kind of what is it that that system is and what do you expect it to be able to do and for me at least that's a system that is reliably able to learn new things that are kind of out of distribution by virtue of its ability to reason to think to solve problems to use tools to come up with new ideas and so I do I think we're at a system that I would call AGI? No. Um, but I think we see we start to see the traces and the um the pieces of that overall system for for generalized learning start to come together uh in models like GPT5 and I suspect suspect in in its successors. Um I don't know if we'll have a point where we are like okay we've crossed from a non-AGI world into an AGI world. Um, and even if there were, I'm not sure we'd actually realize it necessarily until after the fact because one of the things we've learned working with the models that we have is the capability overhang is significant. Um, I think when Sam refers to the intelligence of the models and having a PhD in your pocket, we haven't yet really exploited that as uh as a thing. um you know that in some sense like I think you could pause AI progress right here for 10 years and you'd still have about a decade worth of uh of new products to get built of new ways that people figure out how to use the models uh even at a GPT5 level model um in interesting products and interesting processes um and so there's and one of the kind of interesting things is I think as the models get smarter they almost demand more from a a product building perspective in terms of how you actually plug them into the system I always kind of roughly analogy it to like you could have a really really smart intern um and you know at the end of the day they're only capable of doing a few things for you. They can take notes in meetings, they can write summaries, they can pull basic analyses together, but if you bring a PhD to work um that person has a tremendous capability set that may they may not be totally effective at on the job on day one, but your job is to really figure out how to expose them to enough uh context, enough information, give them the right tools to make them really effective later on. And that process actually takes longer to get them to their full effectiveness than it would an intern. And I think it's going to be similar with AI models. And so uh you know it it is a continuous process and it I don't think it will be linear. Um but uh where we are today I would say uh you know we're we're probably not quite yet at something I would call like an AGI level system. >> Yeah. And it brings up such an interesting question which is does it really make sense to try to make the models smarter from here or is it about trying to build those ancillary capabilities? You know I think Sam mentioned this on the media call but GPT3 he said was high school level intelligence GPT4 maybe the level of a college student and GPT5 an expert. So I guess I wonder for open AI is the quest to add more intelligence to the mix or is it to focus on capabilities other than smarts some of the things that you mentioned like memory and continual learning >> it's going to be I think all those things um certainly there are some unsolved problems uh you mentioned a few here and I would agree with those um that you know you'd expect a really smart person to you know it kind of comes by default that our models still struggle with um and so there's open research there that we still have to do I think to be able to kind of close the loop loop on what I would call the full spectrum of intelligence. Um, but you know, there's intelligence like we were talking about earlier in in the podcast expresses in a lot of different ways. Um, and part of it is just your, you know, pure IQ. It's your knowledge of how things work and your ability to recall information, but then it's also your ability to reason about how to use other tools to solve problems. uh it's your ability to be reflective and to look back on your own chain of thought, your own line of thinking and actually course correct when you feel like you know I actually went down the wrong path and maybe I didn't come up with the right strategy to solve this problem. And so uh that's one of the cool things we see is GPT5 on those vectors um we can actually reliably measure as better than the previous systems we had. And for us, I think one of the real world things that we really want to understand is how do they actually perform uh in you know in in the real world. How do we how do developers use these models? How do enterprises use these models to actually apply them to existing problems, real world problems and see if the next models kind of do better than the last models. Um and so that's uh for us I think the real world benchmark is increasingly becoming important uh as a sign of intelligence relative to the academic benchmarks. And how big of a priority is continual learning within OpenAI? >> We have a lot of priorities. I think um you know certainly that's that's among them. Um but uh we feel really good about our research. >> Middle low priority. >> It's hard to you know the cool thing about OpenAI is um the way that we kind of you know has I think have like systematized being able to do research and this has really been true from the early days of the company. I I joined OpenAI in 2018. um is we we take this kind of highly exploratory approach to research and so we're very much not tops down I think in how we uh how we approach research where there's one idea and everyone kind of just you know gloms on to that one idea and we kind of do one thing at a time. What we really do is a lot of open-ended exploration in small teams. We explore different paths and see if those lead to new ideas that we then kind of cycle back into the kind of core idea, the main line of ideas if they work. And if they don't, we kind of uh we recombine those teams into other ideas that seem to be working and then allow other, you know, new ideas to offshoot from there. And so it really is kind of feeling around in the dark a little bit. And when you find that kind of patch of grass that you're like, okay, we we might be on the right path here, you kind of bring everyone to that point and then kind of let everyone feel around a little more. Um, and I think that's kind of how it has to work. Um I think it's really hard a priori to know these things uh you know in advance. I think you can have intuition and I think our researchers tend to have kind of you know better intuition than than the average but um it really is still scientific exploration. >> Now I want to talk about whether how your plus subscribers or how the people who are using these chat bots will feel using chat GPT will feel the improvements. You know there's an interesting comment from Ethan Malik the Wharton professor who is also experimenting with GPT5. He says, "I think it's a big step forward, but not an unexpected one. If you've been following the curve, he says, "These models got gold at the math Olympiad this week. I'm losing track of what massive advances mean. All the models are improving very quickly right now." Their question is if if you have a model that's capable of graduate level or or college level biology and then it goes to graduate level biology. Um the average chatbot user may not feel that even though it's um even though it's gotten much smarter. So I guess I'm curious how how you think this will be reflected the the increased smarts will be reflected in the average users chat GPT experience and the plus users experience who've been using these reasoning models uh for a while. Is it going to feel any different for them? >> Yeah. Um I saw something on on X that was akin to what you're describing which someone basically kind of said I think for the you know upper echelon of of chat GBT users who are probably in the paid tiers who are very you know active on a daily basis and are really kind of expert level at using these systems they it it's going to feel like an improvement but maybe a uh you know a more subtle improvement but for the average user for the free user um and we're we're bringing GPD5 to our free tier it will feel like a dramatic increase um if you actually look at kind of the way free users have used chatgpt. Most of them have actually not experienced the power of the reasoning models. Um they mostly are using GPT40. Um and you know they they mostly are kind of using it for this very kind of um you know turnbased kind of like very quick uh you know back and forth almost search-like uh that ways and that I think don't actually kind of express the full capability of the model. And so for a lot of people, this will be the first time using a model that has reasoning capability. And not only will it be, you know, the first time using it uh with reasoning, but it'll be the first time that they're experiencing a model making a decision about how long to think about a problem and how good of an answer to give relative to how hard the question is. And so we expect that like for yeah, for the average user, it will feel dramatically different. Maybe for the kind of upper echelon of power user, it may not feel as different. So I would agree with that. Um and and I think that's a natural thing. I don't I think that's actually a good thing. Um that you know it's it it is uh if you've been following the kind of rate of AI progress and you're you're you're kind of exploiting the frontier at every point. Uh yes, it probably is dizzying, but um it all it starts to feel uh it starts to feel more continuous than if you've kind of you know you're using what is basically kind of the the best model from a year or two ago, >> right? I think you're so spot on about the average user is using it as like a search version of search and they're like, "Well, what should I use?" When they speak to me, they're like, "What should I use AI for?" I'm like, just upload stuff and start talking to it about the things you upload. And I had a friend who like was uploading pictures of his son's uh football practice and asking it for tips about like for coaching tips and he was like fairly blown away that this thing is giving some like real analysis of positioning. Uh I mean I wouldn't use it as a football coach, but um I do think that as the average user gets into these capabilities, it's going to be fairly mind-blowing. Yeah, it's, you know, there's everyone's got a little bit of a different entry point and that's the cool thing about it is like it's really personal for everybody. Um, you know, we we focused on health a lot with this release because that was one of the consistently common things that we heard from people as a starting point for how they've used powerful AI was uh in when they're navigating a health journey. Um, and so we really wanted to make an e effort on on making sure that if people are going to be using AI systems for health related things that we could serve them the best possible model and so that was a big a big push for training DPD5. >> Yeah, you brought up health a couple times. Do you want this to replace a GP? I mean, a lot of people are really underserved with healthcare, but I kind of worry about handing them a model that can hallucinate uh and saying this is the substitute now. I don't think it'll replace GPS, but what I think it helps people do is become have more agency in their journey. Uh a little bit more control over uh their you know the process of of managing care. Um it gives people also just an awareness of the condition. So um you know we hear stories all the time of uh people managing uh conditions that you know they didn't really understand because no one actually took the time to explain it to them. Um, and that's not because anyone did anything wrong. It's just because the health system, the health care system as it's designed, doesn't allow for there to be time to allow people to understand what it is that they're they're managing. And so even just giving people that baseline of education of like, you know, this is this is the condition you're managing. Is this common? It's going to express in this ways. You're going to feel these types of symptoms. Um, that's a huge unlock just in people's kind of psychology for uh what it means to be to be managing a disease. Um, and you know, I don't I don't think I think you still have to kind of work with a GP for care, you know, a specialist for care. Um, but having uh something that can can can kind of handhold you through that journey, I think for a lot of people is really comforting and in a lot of cases has actually proven to be helpful. Um, obviously like we want to make sure that model is as accurate as possible. Um, so being able to kind of push the model capability in that domain specifically has been a big area of focus. Um but we think now with uh GPT5 and obviously with you know with future models um we've seen consistently the the rates of accuracy and the rates of hallucination um go up and down respectively. Um GBD5 I think depends on how you measure it but it's you know four to five times uh more accurate than its predecessors. So, and that, you know, that may be more accentuated in health. Uh, we we I don't I don't know off the top of my head, but um but so we have, you know, a lot of control, I think, uh, and and are pushing in the right direction on being able to make them reliable and accurate. >> It's pretty interesting. We're talking about things so far beyond the chatbot. Like, of course, there's the chat function, uh, but there's coding, there's health, and then, of course, there's enterprise or the way that businesses use these models. and businesses are notoriously slow uh at implementing this technology and um I'm sure there's so many approvals and reviews and um it's tough to get things out the door but I do think that when you have better models this is sort of my belief when you have better models you sort of are able to push that forward uh much faster and much more effectively. Um so talk a little bit about what a better model in GPT5 will enable on the enterprise front or business front. >> Yeah. No, I I would agree with your assessment there. I think um in many ways I I always kind of say we haven't yet seen uh the chatbt moment I think in business for AI. Um I think AI was an amazing tool for consumers where you're uh your surf space so to speak is is more narrow. Um and you've got a more constrained problem. uh you've got obviously a much more narrow context uh that you're processing and I think you know you can kind of take things turn by turn with very very few kind of external dependencies uh and you really just kind of let the model's pure intelligence shine. Businesses are a different category of of of difficulty. So uh you've got complex business processes, you've got a lot of uh multi-user dependency. You've got a lot of context that you have to process. You've got a lot of tools that have to be brought to bear. those tools have to be used in succession in certain ways with this, you know, with certain guard rails. Uh, and there have to, you know, there's not as there there's not as much fault tolerance for for when they don't work. Um, and so we, you know, kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier. I think you look at models like GPT5 and the impact that they're going to have in business. It is that baseline of capability that's moved up. It's their ability to uh to use tools to to you know think in a structured way to solve problems um to kind of recursively correct uh you know their own mistakes um to do long context retrieval things like that that actually you know these little things do matter on the edge and that you don't feel them every day in chat GBT as a as an individual user but you will start to feel them as a developer or an enterprise and so um we see this anecdotally too I mean we've worked with uh large enterprises and small startups and the entire spectrum in uh on testing these models and GPD5 specifically before release. Um and we get a lot of feedback from companies like Uber and Amgen and Harvey and Curser um uh Lovable uh you know um uh uh Jet Brains. I mean all companies that have use cases that are highly highly sensitive to the model's ability to reliably call tools um to deal with long context uh to you know uh to um to to problem solve and and reason effectively. And so um it's a it's a rising tide I think across the enterprise and it's just really going to be on on the developers we work with to to be able to kind of uh you know understand the the difference and the improvement and then implement them in the applications that they're building. Yeah, it is interesting to know that you've been you have been already working with many companies uh and letting them use GPT5 already. So, has there been a sort of unified we couldn't do this with the previous models but we can do it now with GPT5 or is it sort of spread out in terms of the capabilities that it's now enabling? >> Um I would say it's it's been uh you know rising tide across the board. So every everyone who's kind of benchmarking and all the companies that we work with typically now are are pretty accustomed to to evaluating and benchmarking performance across all the models that they use but um everyone has kind of reported you know much higher kind of consistently higher performance on those eval there are a few areas in particular we've seen spikes so one is coding for sure um I mentioned companies like cursor jet brains windsurf uh you know cognition and others that we work with who um anecdotally are all uh you know have have all said that GPT5 now feels like the most capable coding model whether that's in an interactive coding environment or more of an agent coding environment. Um and then also one of the things that we see consistently now is its ability to reason and problem solve in very technical domains uh is significantly improved. And so, um, Harvey is a great example of that where, uh, you've got, you know, Harvey AI working with legal firms, uh, and law firms, uh, is, you know, very very reliant on its ability to, uh, reliably, accurately, um, and, uh, and consistently portray, uh, you know, uh, cases that that that it's looking at, legal analysis, um, to provide that kind of level of structured thinking you want when you're doing legal analysis. And so, I expect we'll see that carry over. I mean financial services is a very interesting area heavy on data analysis heavy on research heavy on planning those are all areas that we've seen improvement in and so as we continue to kind of see GPT5 permeate the market we'll get more and more of that feedback and can continue to improve on those use cases and how about pricing because it's half the cost uh of an input an input token is half the cost than GPT40 output token is the same u are these lower costs going to help enable more use cases and and on that note I mean how Does lowering cost sync with the fact that you've raised like 48 billion this year or announced 48 billion in funding? Is it really possible to lower costs and deliver on the expectations that the investors are expecting on that front? >> Yeah. So, we've, you know, in open access history, every time we've cut cost, we've seen typically some corresponding increase in consumption that usually outweighs the cost cut. And so um you know for as long as that trend holds uh we will continue to to cut costs on models. We know that there's this complicated dance that developers have to do between latency uh model quality and intelligence and price. And I think you know what we've tried to do here basically is take the market's feedback on all three of those fronts and really place these models, these GPD5 models, not just the standard model, but also the mini model and the nano model on this frontier of quality, cost, and latency that kind of optimizes for what we think the market needs to be successful. And so we tried to find a really attractive price target um at a very attractive latency um and then obviously with um uh the the the kind of built-in model quality and intelligence you get with GPT5. And so, um, we will continue to push that frontier. And I think the more we push that frontier, typically the more we just see people want to use it for more things. Uh, and so for, you know, that equation to exist, we're very fortunate. And it motivates us to try and make them better. >> Are you ever going to be profitable? >> I hope so. Okay, we'll take it. All right. Uh, Brad, before we wrap, uh, let me be the first to ask you, when is GPT6 coming? >> Well, you're not the first to ask. Um I uh I could tell you, but I already >> u Yeah. No. Uh Twitter is uh has is quick on the trigger on that one, but um uh no, I mean like look, we're like I said, we we think GBD5 is extraordinarily capable. Um we we think there will be better models in the future. We know there will be better models in the future. Um for now, we're just focused on how do we get this in people's hands? How do we support the companies that are building with us using this model? And then we're still in in in the science of it, I think. Um that's the exciting part is like we're in the first inning of it and we ourselves are just understanding the paradigm we're in and so this is I think an important first step and you kind of have to understand where you are to to understand where you're going and um you know hopefully the the the learning from this will make GP6 much better. >> Well Brad so great to have you on especially today on uh GPT5 launch day. So whenever GPT6 comes uh we'll have to do it again. Thank you so much for joining. We >> look forward to it. >> All right folks GPT5 is out. You can try it on uh chat.com and it's going to roll out to everybody. Uh so uh give it a look and uh we'll be back to talk more about it tomorrow where Ron Johnroy and I will break down the week's news, especially uh what the latest is on GPT5. Thanks everybody for listening and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.