OpenAI surprised customers this week when CEO Sam Altman announced on X/Twitter that the company is switching up its planned release schedule. The next ChatGPT model we can expect to see is o3 and o4-mini, coming soon in the next few weeks. But that means GPT-5, the next major overhaul we expect for ChatGPT, is being pushed back to later this year.
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.
there are a bunch of reasons for this, but the most exciting one is that we are going to be able to make GPT-5 much better than we originally…— Sam Altman (@sama) April 4, 2025
This news reverses a February announcement that OpenAI was integrating o3 and other technology in the upcoming ChatGPT-5 model, meaning that o3 would no longer have its own release.
In the meantime, you can use ChatGPT o3-mini. It’s a smaller variant of o3, and we can take some clues from that model about what we can expect in o3. The o3-mini model is a reasoning model, meaning it “thinks” about prompts before responding and is better at solving complex problems. Free and paid ChatGPT users can try out o3-mini, which is also seen as a competitor to DeepSeek, the open-source AI that made a huge splash earlier this year. We don’t know too much about o4-mini — it’s not the same as 4o-mini — but it should be the next generation beyond o3.
There are several other updates sure to keep people busy during the wait. We’re also expecting the company to release its first open-weights model. OpenAI isn’t very transparent about what goes on in the creation and training process of its models (despite its name), so the release of that model will be a big step as well. The open-weights, o3 and o4-mini models are the company’s attempts to remain competitive amid tough competition, including Chinese AIs like DeepSeek.
ChatGPT also got a native image generator, which was so popular that it temporarily overwhelmed the service’s GPUs. Quickly, a trend of creating AI images mimicking the style of Studio Ghibli (the animation studio behind famous films such as Spirited Away and Ponyo) took off. Altman even changed his X/Twitter profile picture to a Studio Ghibli-esque version of himself. However, the founder of Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki, is notoriously against generative AI.
For more, check out our full review of ChatGPT 4 and our beginner’s guide to using the program.
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