Welcome to 9to5Neural. AI moves fast. We help you keep up. Earlier this week, Elon Musk started a bid to buy OpenAI, prompting Sam Altman to informally decline, but poking back about buying Twitter. Entertaining as that was, the world of AI has started to calm down — WAIT, WHAT?! OpenAI just announced ChatGPT-5, and it will arrive this year?
OpenAI boss Sam Altman has masterfully stolen back the news cycle by pretty much laying out the future of ChatGPT. Altman posted what he called an OpenAI roadmap update for both GPT-4.5 and GPT-5 AI models.
Altman starts by acknowledging the complexity that currently exists inside the ChatGPT experience.
We want to do a better job of sharing our intended roadmap, and a much better job simplifying our product offerings. We want AI to “just work” for you; we realize how complicated our model and product offerings have gotten.
A rapid pace of product releases is mostly to blame for the complexity that has built up within ChatGPT. For ChatGPT Plus subscribers, the app currently includes these model options and descriptions:
- GPT-4o: Great for most questions
- GPT-4o with scheduled tasks: Ask ChatGPT to follow up later
- o1: Uses advanced reasoning
- o3-mini: Fast at advanced reasoning
- o3-mini-high: Great at coding and logic
- GPT-4o mini: Faster for most questions
- GPT-4: Legacy model
The challenge for users is knowing which type of model to start with: a large language GPT model or a reasoning o-series model. The challenge for OpenAI is determining which type of model will provide the response you need. That’s something that OpenAI is tackling next.
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. 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 the post, Altman clarified that its previously teased Orion model will be GPT-4.5. That’s coming in a matter of weeks. It won’t include the DeepSeek-like chain-of-thought feature that o3 includes, but ChatGPT-5 and beyond will support chain-of-thought to show how the model thinks through problems.
ChatGPT-5, Altman reveals, will be a unifying model that bridges LLM and reasoning models, and chat features will be available for free. He later adds that ChatGPT-5 is coming in a matter of months.
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. The free tier of ChatGPT will get unlimited chat access to GPT-5 at the standard intelligence setting (!!), subject to abuse thresholds.
Finally, Altman concludes that GPT-5 will offer a higher level of intelligence for paid subscribers, likely referencing more resource-intensive capabilities.
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.
My only concern with Altman’s post is that it wasn’t written in all lowercase characters. Sus, if you ask me.
In an earlier post, Altman also shared that OpenAI plans to allow 10 deep research queries per month for the $20/month tier. Free users will have two deep research queries to start. Deep research currently requires OpenAI’s $200/month ChatGPT Pro plan.
No capital letters for that one.
More on the latest in AI developments in the next edition of 9to5Neural — only on 9to5Mac! Read the previous issue here.
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