Chen: GPT-5 could combine unsupervised scaling with reasoning paradigms
Mark Chen · OpenAI's Chief Research Officer on GPT 4.5's Debut, Scaling Laws, And Teaching EQ to Models · Feb 27, 2025 · at 3:24
OpenAI Chief Research Officer Mark Chen explains the dual axes of scaling—unsupervised learning and reasoning—leading up to GPT-5.
0:00 / 0:06exact quote · 7.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And so I think, like GPT-V really could be the culmination of a lot of these things coming together.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Mark Chen
Chen: GPT-4.5 performance jump matches leap from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4
“It signifies an order of magnitude improvement over the last models, kind of commensurate with the jump from 3.5 to four.”
Chen: AI models cannot learn reasoning from scratch without pre-trained knowledge
“You need knowledge in order to build reasoning on top of it.
Right.
a model can't kind of go in blind and just learn reasoning from scratch.
So we find these two paradigms to be fairly complementary and we think, you know, they have feedback loops on each oth…”
Chen: GPT-4.5 scaling returns remain consistent with OpenAI's prior projections
“You know, we are seeing the same returns, and I do want to stress that GPT-D 4.5 is that next point on this unsupervised learning paradigm, and, you know, we're very rigorous about how we do this. We make projections based on all the models we've trained befor…”
Chen: GPT-4.5 hits expected benchmark progression consistent with OpenAI's trajectory
“Well, I really don't think that the accurate characterization is that it doesn't hit the benchmarks that, that we expect it to. So when you look at kind of the development of three to 3.5 to four to 4.5 this does hit the benchmarks that we expect.”
Chen: Focus on reasoning models caused the longer gap before GPT-4.5
“Why there seems to be, you know, a little bit bigger of a gap in release time between four and 4.5, we've been really largely focused on developing the reasoning parallel paradigm as well.”
Chen: Users prefer GPT-4.5 over GPT-4o by 60% to 70% margins
“When we look at, kind of, comparisons against GPT-FORO you'll see that everyday use cases, people prefer, you know, by a margin of 60% for actually productivity and knowledge work against GPT-FORO, there's almost like a 70% preference rate.”