OpenAI surprised folks 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 that 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
The news is a reversal of 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 a number of 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 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.