OpenAI exec says today's ChatGPT will be 'laughably bad' in 12 months

• OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap says generative AI as it is today will be "laughably bad" within a year. 
• The exec predicts ChatGPT could soon take on more "complex work" and be a "great teammate."
• The tech giant is set to release its latest language model, GPT-5, as early as this summer. 

If you think ChatGPT is impressive, just imagine what the AI chatbot could be capable of doing a year from now.

One OpenAI executive predicts generative AI tools like its own at the moment will be nothing compared to what's to come.

"In the next couple of 12 months, I think the systems that we use today will be laughably bad," the ChatGPT maker's COO Brad Lightcap said on a panel at the 27th annual Milken Institute Global Conference on Monday. "We think we're going to move toward a world where they're much more capable."

Lightcap says large language models, which people use to help do their jobs and meet their personal goals, will soon be able to take on "more complex work."

The COO, reached through OpenAI, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider before publication when asked to specify what he meant by so-called "complex work."

He adds that AI will have more of a "system relationship" with users, meaning the technology will serve as a "great teammate" that can assist users on "any given problem."

"That's going to be a different way of using software," the OpenAI exec said on the panel regarding AI's foreseeable capabilities.

In light of his predictions, Lightcap acknowledges that it can be tough for people to "really understand" and "internalize" what a world with robot assistants would look like.

But in the next decade, the COO believes talking to an AI like you would with a friend, teammate, or project collaborator will be the new norm.

"I think that's a profound shift that we haven't quite grasped," he said, referring to his 10-year forecast.

The exec's thoughts seem to allude to what's to come with GPT-5 — OpenAI's latest model that the AI titan is set to release as early as this summer.

One CEO who got a demo of the new model from OpenAI told Business Insider on conditions of anonymity that GPT-5 is "really good" and "materially better" than GPT-4, the LLM behind ChatGPT.

Though he didn't disclose any specifics, the CEO did note that OpenAI alluded to other "unreleased capabilities," like the ability to call AI agents to perform tasks on their own.

Still, it's clear there's a long way to go before AI can be trusted as a personal assistant, as current systems continue to hallucinate and contain biases.

But at the very least, Lightcap says that a more advanced AI can, at the very least, play the role of a "stand-up comedian," which the OpenAI exec says could be possible.

"We're just scratching the surface on the full kind of set of capabilities that these systems have," he said at the Milken Institute conference. "That's going to surprise us."