OpenAI's EQ Upgrade to Hold Us Over to the IQ Upgrade

Reading over the coverage of yesterday's GPT-4.5 roll-out, I was kicking myself. I had just used one of my all-time favorite scenes from one of my all-time favorite shows to describe another situation in tech. That is, the notion that Meta – and Mark Zuckerberg in particular – would really like to believe that smartphones aren't the thing – they're the thing that gets us to the thing. That thing being whatever future hardware Meta is able to build to finally be able to break away from their reliance on Apple (and to a lesser extent, Google). But the same line, from Halt and Catch Fire popped into my head when thinking about this new GPT model. It's pretty clear that it's not the thing. But the thing that gets us to the thing.

At least that's how it's being framed by pretty much everyone from the company on down. Well, that's not entirely fair, the company isn't really downplaying it, but they're also being careful not to tout it to the high heavens as they have in the past with other such releases. It's a more muted release. And the reason why is obvious: GPT-4.5 isn't the thing. It's the thing that gets us to GPT-5.