I think that was before 4o? I know 4o-mini and o1 for sure have come out since he said that
You say unironically on an article stating that Sam Altman cannot be taken at his word in a string of comments about him hyping up the next thing so he can exit strongly on the backs of the next greater fool. But seriously, I’m sure GPT-5 will be the greatest leap in history (OpenAI equity holder here).
I suspect it's a little different. AI models are still made of math and geometric structures. Like mathematicians, researchers are developing intuitions about where the future opportunities and constraints might be. It's just highly abstract, and until someone writes the beautiful Nautilus Mag article that helps a normie see the landscape they're navigating, we outsiders see it as total magic and unknowable.
But Altman has direct access to the folks intuiting through it (likely not validated intuitions, but still insight)
That's not to say I believe him. Motivations are very tangled and meta here
That’s dead. OpenAI knows that much. There will be more, but they aren’t going to report that we’re doing incremental advances until there’s a significant breakthrough. They need to stay afloat and say what it takes to try and bridge the gap.
Sam Altman himself doesn't know whether it's the case. Nobody knows. It's the natural of R&D. If you can tell whether an architecture works or not with 100% confidence it's not cutting edge.