Sam Altman lays out roadmap for OpenAI’s long-awaited GPT-5 model

On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced a roadmap for how the company plans to release GPT-5, the long-awaited followup to 2023's GPT-4 AI language model that made huge waves in both tech and policy circles around the world. In a reply to a question on X, Altman said GPT-5 would be coming in "months," suggesting a release later in 2025.

Initially, Altman explained in a long post on X, the company plans to ship GPT-4.5 (previously known as "Orion" internally) in a matter of "weeks" as OpenAI's last non-simulated reasoning model. Simulated reasoning (SR) models like o3 use a special technique to iteratively process problems posed by users more deeply, but they are slower than conventional large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4o and not ideal for every task.

After that, GPT-5 will be a system that brings together features from across OpenAI's current AI model lineup, including conventional AI models, SR models, and specialized models that do tasks like web search and research. "In both ChatGPT and our API, we will release GPT-5 as a system that integrates a lot of our technology, including o3," he wrote. "We will no longer ship o3 as a standalone model."

Altman also says that the free tier of ChatGPT users will get "unlimited chat access to GPT-5 at the standard intelligence setting" and that ChatGPT 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."

Altman says these integrated AI models will be able to use many of OpenAI's extended ChatGPT features, he says, including Advanced Voice Mode, Canvas, Search, and Deep Research.

Simplifying a confusing array of products

In the past, Altman has commented about the arbitrary nature of a hypothetical future "GPT-5" label, suggesting that several of the company's AI models released last year could have been christened with that name.