OpenAI Plans O3 and O4-Mini Release Before GPT-5, Altman Says

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed a significant shift in the company's release plans on Friday, announcing that two intermediate models will arrive before its highly anticipated GPT-5.

"Change of plans: We are going to release o3 and o4-mini after all, probably in a couple of weeks, and then do GPT-5 in a few months," Altman wrote on X Friday.

The surprise announcement comes as OpenAI grapples with technical complexities in its flagship model development. Altman admitted the company "found it harder than we thought it was going to be to smoothly integrate everything" into GPT-5, suggesting the staggered release will help ensure sufficient capacity "to support what we expect to be unprecedented demand."

The move places OpenAI in an increasingly crowded field of AI heavyweights rolling out advanced models. Google recently launched Gemini 2.5 Pro, which boasts 1 million tokens of context and has been widely regarded as the best reasoning and coding model available—and is free to use.

Meanwhile, DeepSeek R2,  Grok-3, and Claude 3.7 Sonnet with extended thinking capabilities are all slated for imminent release—each undercutting OpenAI's reasoning model on price.

Altman teased a silver lining: releasing the intermediate models will give OpenAI more time to supercharge GPT-5.

"The most exciting [reason] is that we are going to be able to make GPT-5 much better than we originally thought," he wrote. GPT-5 is expected to be fully multimodal, merging all of OpenAI's specialized models into a single system. That would eliminate the current need for ChatGPT to switch between reasoning models, standard language models, and image generation models based on the prompt. Instead, all these functions would be handled by a unified model.

Technical specifications for o3 and o4-Mini remain under wraps, but they're expected to bridge the capabilities gap between GPT-4 and the forthcoming GPT-5, which industry watchers believe will feature substantial improvements in reasoning, planning, and memory functions.

OpenAI's latest release, the reasoning-focused o1 Pro, came with eyebrow-raising pricing: $150 per million tokens (~750,000 words) for input, and $600 per million tokens generated. That's double the input cost of GPT-4.5 and 10 times the price of regular o1. And for reference, DeepSeek R1 costs less than $1 per million tokens.

The revised roadmap arrives just days after OpenAI closed a historic $40 billion funding round—the largest single fundraising event by any private tech company.