ChatGPT-5 is on hold as OpenAI changes plans and releases new o3 and o4-mini models

ChatGPT logo /Sam Altman
(Image credit: Shutterstock/EI Editorial)

  • ChatGPT-5 is delayed by a few months
  • The time will allow OpenAI to better integrate the new model
  • New o3 and o4-mini models to come in a couple of weeks

OpenAI has changed its plans and is set to put ChatGPT-5 on hold while releasing new o3 and o4-mini models in the next couple of weeks instead.

The news broke today in a tweet by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in which he revealed why the plans were changing:

“There are a bunch of reasons for this”, wrote Altman, “but the most exciting one is that we are going to be able to make GPT-5 much better than we originally thought.

"We also found it harder than we thought it was going to be to smoothly integrate everything, and we want to make sure we have enough capacity to support what we expect to be unprecedented demand.”

The mention of 'capacity to support unprecedented demand' is clearly a reference to the recent outages that ChatGPT has been experiencing as millions of new users signed up to try out the new image generation abilities of ChatGPT-4o.

The next evolution of AI

ChatGPT-5 is the next big evolution of the popular ChatGPT LLM and will be a major development in the future of AI.

Its simpler name was also supposed to represent an alignment shift in OpenAI’s somewhat confusing product-naming conventions that will now soon feature both an o4 and an 4o model in the line-up simultaneously.

Rather than the user having to decide if they wanted to use a smaller, lighter model, such as 4o-mini or a deeper reasoning model, like o4, for their tasks, ChatGPT-5 will decide for you which type of model to use, based on your query.

So far, OpenAI has confirmed that even users on the free tier will have some access to ChatGPT-5 when it comes out, but users on the Pro and Plus tiers will get more. The only word on a release date we’ve been given before was “soon”.

Now it looks like we’ll have to wait a little bit longer for that integration of everything into one model, with Altman stating that ChatGPT-5 would now appear “in a few months”.

ChatGPT-o3 improvements

Commenting on the new o3 model, Altman also stated that, “We were able to really improve on what we previewed for o3 in many ways; I think people will be happy…”

Replying to a user on X who asked if there would also be an o3 Pro model, Altman gave a one-word reply – “coming!” – which would seem to confirm that a pro version of o3 is also in the works.

As to when we will see the o3 and o4-mini models, Altman stated, “in a couple of weeks, and then do GPT-5 in a few months”.

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Graham Barlow
Senior Editor, AI

Graham is the Senior Editor for AI at TechRadar. With over 25 years of experience in both online and print journalism, Graham has worked for various market-leading tech brands including Computeractive, PC Pro, iMore, MacFormat, Mac|Life, Maximum PC, and more. He specializes in reporting on everything to do with AI and has appeared on BBC TV shows like BBC One Breakfast and on Radio 4 commenting on the latest trends in tech. Graham has an honors degree in Computer Science and spends his spare time podcasting and blogging.

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