Launches have been coming in thick and fast from the OpenAI stable over the last couple of months, and CEO Sam Altman has now given the roadmap for future model launches at the company.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that GPT-4.5 is “weeks” away, while GPT-5 will be released in “months”. Altman also said that they wanted to have a unified intelligence system as opposed to the near dozen models that are available for users to choose from at the moment. Altman, however, gave no indications of releasing any open-source models, which he’d indicated OpenAI would do after DeepSeek had released.
“We want to do a better job of sharing our intended roadmap, and a much better job simplifying our product offerings,” Altman posted on X. “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,” he said.
“We will next ship GPT-4.5, the model we called Orion internally, as our last non-chain-of-thought model. After that, 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. 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,” he said.
“The free tier of ChatGPT will get unlimited chat access to GPT-5 at the standard intelligence setting (!!), subject to abuse thresholds. Plus subscribers will be able to run GPT-5 at a higher level of intelligence, and Pro subscribers will be able to run GPT-5 at an even higher level of intelligence. These models will incorporate voice, canvas, search, deep research, and more,” he added.
It’s an aggressive timeline, and one that other AI companies will be watching closely. AI labs have been looking to time their releases so as to make sure that their models upstage others within their cohorts, and having some visibility of OpenAI’s roadmap could help them plan their model launches. OpenAI, though, seems to be quite open to sharing its timelines, and as the current leader in the AI space, seems to be quite happy setting the pace for others to follow.