According to Sam Altman in a podcast with Lex Fridman this week, there is no real indication that it will be dropped this year. They will release a new model, but it might not be GPT-5
Which is an indication of nothing. In which world would Sam A. drop any kind of info about such a sensitive topic? If anything, this could just be deception before a massive drop.
Could also be resetting expectations for people who've been expecting GPT-5 (or just GPT-4.5) sooner - been a year now since GPT-4 was released.
The other odd thing from Altman was saying that GPT-4 sucks.
I think the context for both announcements is the recent release of Anthropic's Claude-3, which in it's largest "Opus" form beats GPT-4 across the board in benchmarks.
I personally think OpenAI/Altman is a bit scared that any moat/lead they had has disappeared and they are now being out-competed by Anthropic (Claude). Remember that Anthropic as a company was only formed (by core members of the OpenAI LLM team) at the same time as GPT-3 was released, so in same time it took OpenAI to go from GPT-3 to GPT-4, Anthropic have gone from nothing -> Claude-1 -> Claude-2 -> Claude-3 which beats GPT-4 !!
Anthropic have also had quite a bit of success attracting corporate business, quite a bit of which is more long-term in nature (sharing details of expected future model capabilities so that partners can target those).
So, I think OpenAI is running a bit scared, and I'd interpret this non-announcement of some model (4.5 or 5) "coming soonish" to be them just waving the flag and saying "we'll be back on top soon", which they presumably will be, briefly, when their next release(s) do come out. Altman's odd "GPT-4 sucks" statement might be meant to downplay Claude-3 "Opus" which beats it.
