OpenAI plans to launch its next Frontier model, Orion, by December, The Verge reported.
Unlike the releases of OpenAI’s last two models, GPT-4o and o1, Orion will not initially be widely released through ChatGPT. Instead, OpenAI plans to first grant access to companies it works closely with to build their own products and features, according to people familiar with the plans.
Another source told The Verge that engineers within Microsoft, OpenAI’s key partner in deploying AI models, are preparing to host Orion on Azure as early as November. That’s it. Orion is considered a successor to GPT-4 internally at OpenAI, but it is unclear whether the company will refer to it externally as GPT-5. As always, release plans are subject to change and may be delayed. OpenAI and Microsoft declined to comment for this story.
Orion has been teased by OpenAI executives as potentially being up to 100 times more powerful than GPT-4. This is separate from the o1 inference model OpenAI released in September. The company’s goal is to combine LLMs over time to eventually create even more powerful models called artificial general intelligence (AGI).
It was previously reported that OpenAI is using o1, codenamed Strawberry, to provide synthetic data to train Orion. In September, OpenAI researchers held a happy hour to celebrate the completion of training a new model, a source familiar with the matter told The Verge.
The timing coincides with a cryptic post about X from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in which he said he was “excited about the winter constellations rising soon.” If you ask ChatGPT o1-preview what’s hidden in Altman’s post, you’ll see that he alludes to the word Orion, a winter constellation that is most visible in the night sky from November to February (although He also shows illusions that he can rearrange the characters (letters that spell “ORION”).
The release of this next model comes at a pivotal time for OpenAI. OpenAI just closed a historic $6.6 billion funding round, requiring the company to reinvent itself as a for-profit entity. The company has also experienced significant staff turnover, with chief technology officer Mira Murati replaced by Bob McGrew, the company’s chief research officer, and Barrett, vice president of post-training. He and Zoff just announced their retirement.
