Claims

Prediction · AI capabilities

“Beating GPT-4 on GI just forces OpenAI to release 4.5.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky, writing on X · 5 March 2024 · Post by @ESYudkowsky on X, 2024-03-05 (X)

If a rival AI developer beats GPT-4 on general intelligence, OpenAI will be forced to release GPT-4.5.

Mixed Partly true and partly false in roughly equal measure.

What would count as true or false

This is a conditional prediction. The condition is met when a rival developer releases a model widely judged (by benchmark leaderboards or broad expert or press consensus) to be better than GPT-4 at general capability. True: the condition is met and OpenAI then releases a model branded GPT-4.5, with the release reported or reasonably presented as a response to losing the lead. Mostly true: OpenAI answers the rival with a clearly upgraded GPT-4 successor under a different name, or releases GPT-4.5 but the causal link to the rival is only weakly shown. Mixed: GPT-4.5 is released eventually, but long after the condition was met, with no evident link to competitive pressure. Mostly false: OpenAI releases no GPT-4.5 and no prompt competitive successor for a long period while rivals stay ahead. False: rivals clearly surpass GPT-4, and OpenAI never releases a GPT-4.5 and makes no competitive release in response. If no rival ever surpasses GPT-4, the claim is unresolvable.

Evidence

1. The AI wars heat up with Claude 3, claimed to have “near-human” abilities Ars Technica · 4 March 2024

   “According to Anthropic, Claude 3 Opus beats GPT-4 on 10 AI benchmarks, including MMLU (undergraduate level knowledge), GSM8K (grade school math), HumanEval (coding), and the colorfully named HellaSwag (common knowledge).”

2. Simon Willison on gpt-4 Simon Willison's Weblog

   ““The king is dead”—Claude 3 surpasses GPT-4 on Chatbot Arena for the first time.”

3. Introducing GPT-4.5 OpenAI · 27 February 2025

   “GPT‑4.5 is an example of scaling unsupervised learning by scaling up compute and data, along with architecture and optimization innovations.”

4. OpenAI launches GPT-4.5, its largest model to date | TechCrunch TechCrunch · 1 March 2025

   “GPT-4.5 is OpenAI’s largest model to date, trained using more computing power and data than any of the company’s previous releases.”

Reasoning

The condition appears to have been met: Ars Technica reported that Claude 3 Opus beat GPT-4 on 10 benchmarks (E1), and Simon Willison's weblog noted that Claude 3 surpassed GPT-4 on Chatbot Arena (E2). OpenAI released a model branded GPT-4.5 on 2025-02-27 (E3, E4), nearly a year after the condition was met. The quoted passages from OpenAI's announcement and TechCrunch's coverage describe GPT-4.5 in terms of scaling compute and data and do not mention a rival model or a competitive response (E3, E4). That matches the criteria's "mixed" case: an eventual release with no evident link to competitive pressure.

Cite this claim

Eliezer Yudkowsky, “If a rival AI developer beats GPT-4 on general intelligence, OpenAI will be forced to release GPT-4.5.” (said 5 March 2024). Verdict: mixed. Reliability API, claim c_51a36d84a2e5, method 0.1.0+c876030c. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_51a36d84a2e5