OpenAI sets GPT-4.5 and GPT-5 timeline

Author

Alex Wilhelm
February 12, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

Top News

  • OpenAI charts new product direction: Looking forward to using OpenAI’s o3 model? Too bad, the company is moving in a new direction. Per Sam Altman, the AI foundation model company will release GPT-4.5 as its “last non-chain-of-thought model,” after which GPT-5 will come “as a system that integrates a lot of our technology, including o3.” GPT-5 is months away, while GPT-4.5 is weeks away, per Altman. DeepSeek, the ball is back in your court. For now.

  • Anthropic and Snowflake team up: Snowflake, the data lake company that has posted impressive historical growth, is teaming up with foundation AI model company Anthropic to “integrate Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet model into Snowflake’s new Cortex Agents platform,” VentureBeat reports. Anthropic, a TWiST500 company, needs to chart its own path to monetization and has leaned more on its API than its consumer offerings to drive revenue thus far. Its new deal with Snowflake underscores that its strategy still has legs.

  • Meta may buy AI chip company: Facebook parent Meta is considering buying South Korean chip startup FuriosaAI, Forbes reports. The company’s chips are built to run open-source AI models, which Meta is famous for building and releasing. The synergies are not hard to spot. As Meta has a $60 to $65 billion investment planned for infra this year, it certainly can afford the smaller company. As the TWiST500 includes a number of chip companies (Etched, Cerebras, etc.), we’re watching this space carefully.

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According to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, quantum computers that are “practically useful” are a mere half-decade to a decade out in the future. Pichai is talking his book somewhat, given that Alphabet is working on quantum chips of its own, but the comments are notable all the same.

If and when quantum computing becomes mainstream, much could change. Computing work that was previously impossible could become trivial, and some current technologies could be smashed (hello, modern encryption). But what’s fun is that Google thinks that the industry that a number of startups are working on—quantum—is racing to commercial viability.

There are two quantum computing startups on the TWiST500 today: Alice & Bob and Quantinuum. I think it’s time for a few more, so will be off in those mines for a little while.

Elsewhere in frontier-tech-land, we taped an interview with Zap Energy this week that we’ve banked, and we had the CEO of Helion Energy on as well. As with quantum computing, fusion energy production has long been just out of reach. But there are so many startups trying so many different approaches to each that we’re damned excited.

More, please. And faster, if we could. — Alex



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