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

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed a significant change in the bank’s release ideas on Friday, announcing that two middle models will appear before its greatly anticipated GPT-5.

” Change of plans: We are going to launch o3 and o4-mini after all, perhaps in a couple of weeks, and then do GPT-5 in a few times”, Altman wrote on X Friday.

The surprise announcement comes as OpenAI grapples with complex challenges in its lineup type creation. Altman admitted the company “found it harder than we thought it was going to be to easily integrate everything” into GPT-5, suggesting the tilted release may help ensure adequate capacity” to support what we expect to be exceptional demand”.

The move places OpenAI in an extremely crowded field of AI superstars rolling out sophisticated models. Google just launched Gemini 2.5 Pro, which boasts 1 million currencies of environment and has been widely regarded as the best argument and programming design available—and is free to use.

However, DeepSeek R2, &nbsp, Grok-3, and Claude 3.7 Sonnet with extended considering abilities are all slated for immediate release—each undercutting OpenAI’s logic type on cost.

Altman teased a silver lining: releasing the middle models will offer OpenAI more day to recharge 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 completely bidirectional, merging all of OpenAI’s specific models into a single program. That would reduce the current have for ChatGPT to switch between argument models, common language models, and image generation models based on the quick. 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.