OpenAI now claims that it plans to deploy both o3 and its next-generation successor, o4-mini, in "a couple of weeks" after essentially scrapping the market launch of its o3 reasoning model in February.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated in a post on X that the path reversal is connected to the company's next GPT-5, which it has previously stated will be a unified model with reasoning capabilities.
“[W]e are going to be able to make GPT-5 much better than we originally thought,” Altman wrote on X. “[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 went on to say that OpenAI anticipates releasing GPT-5 "in a few months," which is later than initially projected.
OpenAI has stated that it plans to provide unlimited chat access to GPT-5 at the "standard intelligence setting," subject to "abuse thresholds," to the extent that it has disclosed information about the test.
GPT-5 can be run at a "higher level of intelligence" by ChatGPT Plus users, and at a "even higher level of intelligence" by OpenAI's ChatGPT Pro plan members.
In an X post earlier this year, Altman mentioned a number of features that OpenAI has introduced in ChatGPT over the previous few months, writing, "[GPT-5] will incorporate voice, Canvas, search, deep research, and more."
“[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.”
Competitors like the Chinese AI lab DeepSeek, which has taken a "open" approach to model launches, are putting more pressure on OpenAI.
These "open" rivals, in contrast to OpenAI, make their models accessible to the AI community for testing and, occasionally, commercialization.
In the upcoming months, OpenAI intends to release its first open language model since GPT‑2, in addition to o3, a “o3 pro” model, o4-mini, and GPT-5.
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According to Altman earlier this week, this model will be able to reason and will undergo more safety testing.