OpenAI Can Release Next-Generation Model by December.

OpenAI plans to release its boundary model of the next generation, codenamed Orion and rumored to be GPT-5, by December, according to an exclusive report from The Verge. However, OpenAI’s president, Sam Altman, is already opposing this.

According to “sources familiar with the plan,” Orion will not initially be released to the general public, as previous iterations of GPT-4 have been. Instead, the company intends to deliver the new model to specific companies and partners, who will then use it as a platform to build their own products and services. This is the same strategy Nvidia follows with its NVLM 1.0 family of Large Language Models (LLMs).

Furthermore, reports from The Verge indicate that Microsoft plans to host the new model starting in November. There is no confirmation yet that Orion will be called GPT-5 upon release, although its engineers consider the model to be the successor to GPT-4.

Within hours of the report being published on Friday, Altman shyly denied these allegations, saying, “Fake news is out of control.” However, he did not completely deny that Orion would be released in December, and did not mention any specific aspects of The Verge’s story as being inaccurate in reality.

Since the release of Project Strawberry, also known as 01 Preview and 01-mini over a month ago, OpenAI’s sudden project launch, designed for “deductive” reasoning to answer questions and solve complex problems accurately across various subjects – including science, programming, and mathematics – faster than anyone can do.

However, the 01 models did not receive the same level of enthusiasm as GPT-4, partly because the new models are limited in their functions, unable to upload files or analyze images, and as noted by VentureBeat, they are expensive for OpenAI to operate.

Prior to the release of Preview 01, Altman posted a series of cryptic tweets, hinting at fruit. It seems he is doing the same with Orion. In September, as the company was about to finish training Orion using synthetic data created by 01, Altman made a clear tweet about a visit to the Midwestern region. As The Verge pointed out, the dominant constellation in the winter sky in the northern hemisphere is, as guessed, Orion.

Rumors about GPT-5 have been circulating the internet for several months now, primarily since the launch of GPT-4 in March 2023. Reports initially set the release date sometime in the summer of 2024, but as that passed, the target was moved to this fall. On the other hand, former technology executive Mira Morati said in an interview conducted with her last June (before leaving the company) that the “next generation” model was not scheduled to be released until another year and a half.

So, while an launch later in December seems plausible, timing could coincide with the second anniversary of ChatGPT, it may also not come until 2025 based on the lack of accuracy in all predictions so far.