OpenAI postpones o3 model release, will wrap it up with GPT-5 instead

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman wrote a social media post with an update on the roadmap for ChatGPT. In it, he explained that they’ve halted the launch of its upcoming o3 reasoning model to instead focus more on a streamlined yet monolithic version of GPT-5.

“We want AI to ‘just work’ for you; we realize how complicated our model and product offerings have gotten.

We hate the model picker as much as you do and want to return to magic unified intelligence.

We will next ship GPT-4.5, the model we called Orion internally, as our last non-chain-of-thought model.

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In both ChatGPT and our API, we will release GPT-5 as a system that integrates a lot of our technology, including o3. We will no longer ship o3 as a standalone model.”

In January, OpenAI released a lighter version of o3 called o3-mini, which is particularly well-suited to handling STEM subjects and coding. The idea was to release the broader o3 model soon after that. Instead, the new plan is to next launch GPT-4.5, which will be the company’s last AI model without chain-of-thought thinking.

After that, OpenAI wants to unify the o-series and GPT-series models by creating an all-encompassing system that incorporates all the tools and knows which one to prioritize for a given task. That new system will be GPT-5, which will also include the upcoming o3 model. GPT-4.5 will be released in a few weeks and GPT-5 in a few months.

According to Altman, the free version of ChatGPT will have unlimited access to GPT-5 at the level of standard intelligence. ChatGPT Plus subscribers will be able to run GPT-5 at a higher intelligence level, and ChatGPT Pro subscribers at an even higher level.