Sam Altman lays out future of OpenAI and ChatGPT

Sam Altman, head of OpenAI which develops ChatGPT, has laid out plans for the next versions of its language models. As the artificial intelligence industry races forward, the announcement is a shot across the bow after Chinese AI chatbot, Deepseek R1 showed up in the industry.

Deepseek upended everything, by providing a free and comparable model to OpenAI’s o1, which costs subscribers $200 a month. To battle this, Altman has announced that GPT-5 will be free using a “standard intelligence setting”.

He doesn’t elaborate on what this means in the post, just that subscribers will have access to a “higher level of intelligence.” Those subscribed to the more advanced GPT-5 will have access to OpenAI’s other generative tech like “voice, canvas, search, deep research, and more.”

In a response on X (formerly Twitter), he said that ChatGPT-4.5 and 5 would launch in the coming “weeks/months”.

The OpenAI CEO also said that the company will ship GPT-4.5 as its “last non-chain-of-thought model.” Essentially, these models will break a task down, in an attempt to mimic human thought. ChatGPT-4 and 3.5 currently just spit out the answer without explaining how it got there.

OpenAI has been working on these reasoning models for some time, with its o-series focused on that aspect.

Altman also appeared more concerned with how the software was being packaged. The company will now scrap shipping a standalone o3, in favor of “unifying” its o-series models. He also claimed that the team “hate the model picker” and wants to “return to magic unified intelligence.”

As such, GPT-5 will incorporate o3, which will play into the chain-of-thought plan going forward.

It appears that the company is planning and attempting to get its house in order. OpenAI is currently pivoting from non-profit to for-profit, and these drastic changes appear to be part of those plans. In the last week, Elon Musk has offered to buy out the company for $97 billion, but this was rejected by Altman over X. Musk retaliated by calling him a swindler.

Featured image: Wikicommons, OpenAI

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