OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, is said to be facing significant delays in the development schedule of its next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) model GPT-5, struggling with a lack of data and substantial expense issues.
According to a report by The Wall Street Journal on the 22nd (local time), OpenAI has been conducting large-scale training for its next-generation AI model, known by the codename 'Orion', for more than 18 months but has encountered several obstacles without obtaining the expected results.
GPT-5 has shown better performance than the existing GPT-4, but evaluations suggest that its achievements have not been sufficient to justify the expense incurred. Industry estimates indicate that such large-scale training could cost $500 million (approximately 724.75 billion won) solely in computing expenses over about six months.
To solve the data shortage issue, OpenAI is attempting to generate new data directly. To that end, it has hired software engineers and mathematicians to create code for AI learning or to solve complex mathematical problems; however, this approach requires much more time than existing methods. Additionally, as competitors offer salaries in the millions of dollars to scout key researchers from OpenAI, the burden of labor costs and expenses is increasing.
Meanwhile, concerns have been raised that improvements in model performance across the AI industry, not just at OpenAI, have stagnated. Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder of OpenAI, noted in a lecture on the 13th that 'while computing power is improving, the data needed for learning is not increasing' because 'the resources of the Internet are finite.' He likened the data shortage to fossil fuel depletion, warning that 'pre-training for generative AI models will eventually reach its limits.'
OpenAI unveiled its advanced reasoning AI model 'o3' on the 20th but has not disclosed a specific release date for GPT-5. As OpenAI fails to meet the expectations of major investors such as Microsoft, the industry is paying close attention to how the company will overcome these challenges.