Sam Altman announces GPT-5 timeline update, cancels o3 as standalone model

OpenAI will ship GPT-5 in a matter of months and streamline its AI models into more unified products, said CEO Sam Altman in an update on Feb. 12.

“We want to do a better job of sharing our intended roadmap, and a much better job simplifying our product offerings,” said Altman in an X post introducing several updates about the company’s GPT and o series. Specifically, Altman says the company plans to launch GPT-4.5 as its “last non-chain-of-thought model” and integrate its latest o3 reasoning model into GPT-5.

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The estimated timing for GPT-4.5 is a matter of weeks, and GPT-5 in a matter of months, Altman responded in a comment about the ETA.

OpenAI’s previously comfortable position atop the AI throne has been challenged lately with the introduction of DeepSeek’s reasoning model R1. The Chinese company reportedly made the model for a fraction of the price and offered it free of charge as a chatbot, and significantly cheaper than OpenAI models for API access. In addition to rocking the stock market, DeepSeek’s arrival on the scene threw OpenAI and other AI companies’ business strategy into question, proving AI models can be made cheaply and more accessibly.

Perhaps, Altman’s announcement represents changing tack. Instead of demanding $200 a month for exclusive or early access to certain model features with its Pro plan, the new strategy seems to be getting its products into as many hands as possible to beat the competition with market capture and user-friendly experience.

“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,” said Altman in the lengthy post. That means OpenAI won’t ship o3 as a standalone model and will instead incorporate its reasoning abilities, which improves accuracy and is better for more complex problems, into GPT-5.

GPT-5 in ChatGPT will also have voice mode, canvas, search, and deep research built in so that the chatbot automatically adapts to the user’s needs without the user having to switch between various models and features.

Altman also said that GPT-5 will be available to the free ChatGPT tier, and Plus and Pro subscribers will get access to “GPT-5 at a higher level of intelligence,” with the Pro subscription having the most advanced version.