Next top model: GPT-5 and its AI rivals
The Intelligence from The Economist
The Economist
4.6 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 12 August 2025
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A look at progress in generative AI shows that OpenAI’s latest, greatest model sits on a neat curve of growing utility over time. But what other firms are on that curve, and where is it taking humanity? After a long, wary time, Japanese savers are getting into investing—with gusto. And what goofy, small-time wrestling leagues reveal about today’s America.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Economist |
| 0:02.0 | Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from The Economist. |
| 0:10.0 | I'm your host, Jason Palmer. |
| 0:14.0 | Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. |
| 0:20.0 | For a long time, perspective on the events shaping your world. |
| 0:31.6 | For a long while in Japan, after the bursting of the asset price bubble in the 1990s and a long era of deflation, investment just didn't look smart. With inflation now on the way up, all that is changing. Across the board, Japanese |
| 0:39.3 | people have investing fever. And here are some words that until recently didn't really go |
| 0:45.7 | together in America, indie wrestling league. The big purveyors of the country's fakesest sport |
| 0:52.7 | are on the ropes, and lots of smaller, frankly, bonkers |
| 0:56.0 | outfits are drawing dedicated crowds. |
| 0:58.0 | But first... For nearly seven decades of work by artificial intelligence researchers, not a whole lot happened. |
| 1:17.1 | There was even an AI winter when many thought the field was just dead. |
| 1:21.6 | Boy, did that change quick. |
| 1:24.1 | In 2017, Google researchers came up with something called a transformer. |
| 1:29.2 | No, not that kind. It's a mathematical thing. |
| 1:32.6 | The next year, a little American company called OpenAI had turned that thing into a generative pre-trained transformer, GPT for short. |
| 1:42.1 | You see where this is going. |
| 1:43.1 | In 2022, out came chat GPT, and the world lost its collective mind. |
| 1:49.0 | Suddenly, not even three years later, AI has gone fully pervasively global, |
| 1:55.0 | and Open AI is still at the frontier. |
| 1:58.0 | Last week with GPT5. |
| 2:00.0 | It can write an entire computer program from scratch to help you with whatever you'd like. |
... |
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