OpenAI’s next-generation Orion model of ChatGPT, which is both rumored and denied to be arriving by the end of the year, may not be all it’s been hyped to be once it arrives, according to a new report from The Information.
Citing anonymous OpenAI employees, the report claims the Orion model has shown a “far smaller” improvement over its GPT-4 predecessor than GPT-4 showed over GPT-3. Those sources also note that Orion “isn’t reliably better than its predecessor [GPT-4] in handling certain tasks,” specifically coding applications, though the new model is notably stronger at general language capabilities, such as summarizing documents or generating emails.
The Information’s report cites a “dwindling supply of high-quality text and other data” on which to train new models as a major factor in the new model’s insubstantial gains. In short, the AI industry is quickly running into a training data bottleneck, having already stripped the easy sources of social media data from sites like X, Facebook, and YouTube (the latter on two different occasions.) As such, these companies are increasingly having difficulty finding the sorts of knotty coding challenges that will help advance their models beyond their current capabilities, slowing down their pre-release training.
That reduced training efficiency has massive ecological and commercial implications. As frontier-class LLMs grow and further push their parameter counts into the high trillions, the amount of energy, water, and other resources is expected to increase six-fold in the next decade. This is why we’re seeing Microsoft try to restart Three Mile Island, AWS buy a 960 MW plant, and Google purchase the output of seven nuclear reactors, all to provide the necessary power for their growing menageries of AI data centers — the nation’s current power infrastructure simply can’t keep up.
In response, as TechCrunch reports, OpenAI has created a “foundations team” to circumvent the lack of appropriate training data. Those techniques could involve using synthetic training data, such as what Nvidia’s Nemotron family of models can generate. The team is also looking into improving the model’s performance post-training.
Orion, which was originally thought to be the code name for OpenAI’s GPT-5, is now expected to arrive at some point in 2025. Whether we’ll have enough available power to see it in action, without browning out our municipal electrical grids, remains to be seen.
Mozilla is giving Firefox’s Smart Window two new tricks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Smart Window is an optional AI mode in Firefox with a built-in chat that helps you get things done while you browse. With this update, it can fill out online forms using details from your tabs and keep an eye on websites for you.
Tired of typing the same details into every form?
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.