After effectively cancelling the consumer launch of its o3 reasoning model in February, OpenAI now says it plans to release both o3 and a next-gen successor, o4-mini, in “a couple of weeks.”
In a post on X on Friday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the reversal in course is related to OpenAI’s upcoming GPT-5, which OpenAI has previously said will be a unified model incorporating so-called reasoning capabilities.
“[W]e are going to be able to make GPT-5 much better than we originally thought,” Altman wrote. “[W]e also found it harder than we thought it was going to be to smoothly integrate everything. [A]nd we want to make sure we have enough capacity to support what we expect to be unprecedented demand.”
Altman added that OpenAI expects to roll out GPT-5 “in a few months” — later than originally anticipated.
To the extent that OpenAI has published details about GPT-5, the company has said it intends to offer unlimited chat access to GPT-5 at the “standard intelligence setting” subject to “abuse thresholds” once the model is generally available. Subscribers to ChatGPT Plus will be able to run GPT-5 at a “higher level of intelligence,” Altman previously said, while ChatGPT Pro subscribers will be able to run GPT-5 at an “even higher level of intelligence.”
“[GPT-5] will incorporate voice, canvas, search, deep research, and more,” he wrote in an X post early this year, referring to a range of features OpenAI has launched in ChatGPT over the past few months. “[A] top goal for us is to unify [our] models by creating systems that can use all our tools, know when to think for a long time or not, and generally be useful for a very wide range of tasks.”