OpenAI lays out plans for GPT-5

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman detailed plans for the company’s GPT-4.5 and GPT-5 AI models in a roadmap published on X on Wednesday.

In the post, Altman also acknowledged that OpenAI’s product lineup has gotten complicated and says that the company wants to do “a much better job” simplifying its offerings. “We hate the model picker as much as you do and want to return to magic unified intelligence,” Altman says.

The company plans to ship GPT-4.5, which he says was called Orion internally, will be OpenAI’s “last non-chain-of-thought model.” The Verge reported on some details about Orion last year.

Following GPT 4.5, “a top goal for us is to unify o-series models and GPT-series 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,” Altman says.

With both ChatGPT and OpenAI’s API, the company plans to “release GPT-5 as a system that integrates a lot of our technology, including o3,” Altman says, adding that “we will no longer ship o3 as a standalone model.” OpenAI first teased o3 in December and launched o3-mini in January.

When GPT-5 is available, Altman says that free ChatGPT users will get “unlimited chat access” at “the standard intelligence setting.” Plus subscribers will be able to use GPT-5 at “a higher level of intelligence” and Pro subscribers getting “an even higher level of intelligence.”

Altman didn’t say exactly when GPT-4.5 and GPT-5 might be released, but he did give a vague estimate of “weeks / months.”

This week, Elon Musk offered to buy OpenAI’s nonprofit arm for $97.4 billion, but OpenAI’s board of directors plans to reject the bid.