OpenAI says it’ll release o3 after all, delays GPT-5

After effectively cancelling the consumer release of its o3 reasoning model in February, OpenAI now says it plans to release both o3 and a next-gen successor, o4-mini, in “a couple of weeks.”

In a post on X on Friday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the change in roadmap is related to OpenAI’s upcoming GPT-5, which OpenAI has previously said will be a unified model that incorporates so-called reasoning capabilities.

“[W]e are going to be able to make GPT-5 much better than we originally thought,” Altman said. “[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 added that OpenAI expects to release GPT-5 “in a few months” — later than originally planned.

To the extent that OpenAI has released details about GPT-5, the company has said it intends to offer unlimited chat access to GPT-5 at the “standard intelligence setting” subject to “abuse thresholds” once the model is generally available. Subscribers to ChatGPT Plus will be able to run GPT-5 at a “higher level of intelligence,” Altman previously said, while ChatGPT Pro subscribers will be able to run GPT-5 at an “even higher level of intelligence.”