OpenAI plans to launch Orion, its next frontier model, by December. The Verge reported.
Unlike the release of OpenAI’s last two models, GPT-4o and o1, Orion won’t initially be released widely through ChatGPT. Instead, OpenAI is planning to grant access first to companies it works closely with in order for them to build their own products and features, according to a source familiar with the plan.
Another source tells The Verge that engineers inside Microsoft — OpenAI’s main partner for deploying AI models — are preparing to host Orion on Azure as early as November. While Orion is seen inside OpenAI as the successor to GPT-4, it’s unclear if the company will call it GPT-5 externally. As always, the release plan is subject to change and could slip. Microsoft declined to comment for this story, and OpenAI initially declined.
After CEO Sam Altman called this story “fake news,” OpenAI spokesperson Niko Felix told The Verge that the company doesn’t “have plans to release a model code-named Orion this year” but that “we do plan to release a lot of other great technology.”
TechCrunch reported OpenAI says that it doesn’t intend to release an AI model code-named Orion this year, countering recent reporting on the company’s product roadmap.
“We don’t have plan to release a model code-named Orion this year,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch via mail. “We do plan to release a lot of other great technology.”
OpenAI previously told TechCrunch that The Verge’s report wasn’t accurate, but declined to elaborate further.
Orion, a step up from OpenAI’s current flagship, GPT-4o, is reportedly trained in part on synthetic training data from o1, the company’s “reasoning” model. Open AI plans for the foreseeable future to continue developing new “GPT” models alongside reasoning models like o1, which it sees as addressing fundamentally different use cases.
Open AI’s statement leaves substantial wiggle room. It could be that the company’s next major model isn’t, in fact, Orion. Or perhaps, OpenAI will release a new model by December, but one less capable than Orion.
TechRadar reported OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has slammed a media report about the imminent release of Orion, which is effectively ChatGPT-5, with a terse tweet on X.com. He described the report as “fake news out of control,” squashing rumors of a new version of ChatGPT before December.
The report by The Verge quotes ‘sources’ as claiming Microsoft is planning to host Orion, the successor to ChatGPT-4 on its servers in November, pointing towards a release for the new LLM in time for ChatGPT’s 2nd birthday next month.
Many users took this to mean a new product launch was imminent around the time of ChatGPT’s 2nd birthday (ChatGPT was released on 30 November 2022). Altman’s latest X.com post however would seem to remove any ambiguity around the event.
In my opinion, it appears that various news sites have either gotten their news regarding Orion from sources that are unnamed. As such, we will have to wait and see what actually happens.