One year after GPT-4 was released we are all excited for a monumental leap forward with GPT-5.

People who have close ties to or are investors in OpenAI seem to be traveling to San Franscico right now as their Twitter status updates show. Is GPT-5 close to its public release?

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, shared his excitement for the most recent podcast with Lex Fridman.

"I'm excited about being smarter," Sam remarked, highlighting the holistic improvement of GPT-5 over its predecessor.

Altman emphasizes that the forthcoming iteration isn't just about isolated advancements. Instead, it's "getting better across the board."

I'm excited about being smarter.\ The really special thing happening is that it's not getting better in one area and worse at others.\ It's getting better across the board.\ — Sam Altman

Lex Fridman eloquently suggests that the true magic lies in the notion of being "heard and understood" by an AI.

He hopes that GPT-5 will increase the moments of "intellectual connection," that mirror these magical moments of connection one feels when another person just "gets you."

This is insofar fascinating as Lex highlights that it isn't solely about raw intelligence or the mechanical processing of language. But the moments when the AI can grasp the deeper questions behind your questions, providing responses that make you feel profoundly understood, even when articulated imperfectly, in the way only a close friend or colleague only grasps one.

…it's just such a good feeling when it got you like what you're thinking about. And I look forward to it getting me even better.\ — Lex Fridman

Both Sam and Lex share the excitement for an AI that does more than just compute or predict. An AI that can truly understand you, that can truly "get" you, making the interaction with it feel more like a dialogue with a thoughtful partner rather than strings of unsatisfactory query-response transactions.

As Fridman aptly puts it, "all of us love being understood, heard, and understood."

You feel like there's an understanding in your crappy formulated prompts that you're doing, that it grasps the deeper question behind the question that you posed. Yeah, I'm also excited by that.\ — Lex Fridman

The anticipation surrounding GPT-5 centers on this very concept—AI that not only hears but understands and responds in a way that feels deeply connected to our thoughts and intentions.

With Altman’s remarks, that the enhancements are not confined to a single aspect but extends across the board the evolution from GPT-4 to GPT-5 promises AI interactions getting more empathetic, more intuitive, and more aligned with a human-like experience and not just a technical upgrade.