OpenAI is going all in on its next AI model, codenamed Spud. After facing pressure from Anthropic in the entreprise market, the Sam Altman-led firm is cutting down on distractions to focus on its core products. And it appears that Spud could be a big leap for the AI startup. Now, OpenAI President Greg Brockman has given a hint of the improvements we can expect from Spud.
In an episode of the Big Technology podcast, Brockman claimed that Spud would set the new benchmark for AI models, with “two years worth of research” coming to fruition.
Spud gives “big model smell”
According to the OpenAI chief, Spud, which is rumoured to be GPT 5.5, is going to be much smarter than the company’s previous AI models. So much so, that he has a term for it, called “big model smell,” seemingly taking a reference from the new car smell phrase.
Greg Brockman claimed that Spud will be better at understanding contexts for tasks without needing the user to give detailed explanations. He added, “When you ask a question and the AI doesn’t quite get it, it’s always so disappointing And you have to explain, and you’re just like, ‘you really should be able to figure this out.’”
Brockman insisted that users will be able to use Spud for various tasks without “thinking very much.”
As per reports Spud is currently in a pre-training phase, and could be released later this year. The new AI model will be important for OpenAI which is looking to double down on its core products in a bid to manage its finances.
While the company is focusing on its core products, it has also decided to pause development of an erotic mode for ChatGPT and shut down its video generation platform Sora.
OpenAI chief says AGI played a role in shutting down on Sora
OpenAI’s decision to shut down Sora came as a surprise to many. The company had signed a billion-dollar deal with Disney just a few months ago for the video-generation platform. However, according to Greg Brockman, OpenAI decided to abandon Sora to focus on reaching artificial general intelligence – a state where AI can think like humans.
He explained, “There’s been this debate of how far will the text models go? How far can text intelligence go?… And I think that we have definitively answered that question. It is going to go to AGI. Like, we see line of sight.”
AGI was OpenAI’s original goal when the organisation was first established over a decade ago. According to Brockman, the company decided to shut down Sora in an effort to provide more compute for its future models. He added, “[At] this moment the kinds of applications [AGI] that we’ve always dreamed of are starting to come into reach.”
