Sam Altman compares today's ChatGPT to a 'barely useful cellphone'

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman compared the current ChatGPT model to a "barely useful cellphone."
• Altman said the company hasn't seen as many world-changing applications as they would like.

Remember the first cellphone that had a black and white screen and could only display numbers?

Maybe you don't.

But OpenAI CEO Sam Altman does — and he compared it to the current model of ChatGPT.

"We're at this barely useful cellphone," Altman said this week at the World Government Summit, where he made a virtual appearance.

That, he said, is why the company needs to push forward with bigger and better models of the technology. Using the evolution of the mobile phone as a parallel, the CEO said OpenAI eventually wants to deliver the latest iPhone model.

"We have not seen as much world-changing application as we'd like," Altman said.

The tech CEO said he envisioned a future where everyone has their own personal tutor, personalized medical advice, and scientists have the ability to cure diseases and solve environmental issues.

"I think we can raise the standard of living so incredibly much if everyone has access to abundant amounts of really high-quality intelligence," Altman said. "And they can use those tools to create whatever they want to do."

While he said that a lot of people use AI services and get value out of them, Altman also mentioned that scientists haven't been able to quantify how much AI has improved their productivity.

OpenAI is working on its next large language AI model, GPT-5, which is expected to be smarter than ever, according to Altman. As each model gets smarter, the technology that people use to access the AI, like ChatGPT, will continue to improve, the CEO said.

GPT-4 was released in March 2023, and since then, GPT-4 Turbo, which is the most-advanced AI model that OpenAI has publicly acknowledged launching— although some ChatGPT users have speculated a GPT-4.5 Turbo model was silently released since then.

In the meantime, the OpenAI CEO asks the world "to be patient." In an ideal world, Altman said he would like people to experiment with the technology as it's being created and add regulations as things go wrong.

The tech CEO said he didn't know how long it would take to use large language models to solve the biggest questions in science. However, Altman said he expects the technology to get much better within a few years.

In a decade, he said, it should be "pretty remarkable."