The comparison between a much-anticipated and likely sophisticated AI and a massive weaponized spaceship from ‘Star Wars’ is, at best, a little odd.
Sam Altman posted a picture of the Death Star, a powerful planet destroyer from the sci-fi franchise “Star Wars”, with no accompanying text, just a day ahead of OpenAI’s likely unveiling of its GPT-5 AI model.
The choice of the imagery, ahead of one of the most significant product rollouts, is at best odd. The Death Star was an enormous spaceship conceived by the series’ antagonist, Darth Sidious, and used by Darth Vader, one of pop culture’s most iconic villains, to obliterate planets and intimidate rebel forces.
In short, the dark side used it for galactic-scale destruction. But in true cinematic fashion, the “good guys,” led by Jedi Luke Skywalker, blew it up to restore peace — until, of course, the next round of Star Wars sequels landed.
The reference likely teases the massive capabilities of the upcoming GPT-5, although the “evil” connotation isn’t the best look. Still, the new AI model is expected to be a giant leap from its predecessor, GPT-4, which was released over two years ago.
To be sure, consumer and enterprise adoption of AI has surged massively in the last two years, partly due to the benchmarks set by GPT-4. More recently, AI development has shifted to focus on highly capable models that use less and less computing power.
After the X post, Atlman followed up with another saying that OpenAI is hosting a livestream at 10 am PT on Thursday. He said the event “will be longer than usual, around an hour. We have a lot to show and hope you can find the time to watch!” He did not specify what it was about.
Reuters reported on Wednesday that early testers were impressed with GPT-5’s ability to code and solve science and math problems, but they believe the leap from GPT-4 to GPT-5 is not as large as the one from GPT-3 to GPT-4.
Even though OpenAI has brought to market new offerings, such as AI agents and lightweight as well as deep research-focused AI models, at a rapid pace recently, the GPT-5 release is crucial. Microsoft, Meta, X, and the Chinese AI industry, led by Alibaba, are investing heavily to compete with the ChatGPT-maker.
Meta has ramped up its AI hiring spree, dangling multi-million dollar packages to lure top talent to its new Superintelligence team. Meanwhile, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk — who has clashed with Altman over OpenAI’s nonprofit status claims — has been actively promoting xAI’s latest generative media push, spotlighting Grok’s new image and video creation capabilities.
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