OpenAI to release o3, o4-mini ahead of GPT-5 launch later this year

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced a shift in the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) model release schedule, revealing that intermediate models known as ‘o3’ and ‘o4-mini’ will be launched in the coming weeks, ahead of the much-anticipated GPT-5 rollout scheduled for later this year.

In a tweet on Thursday, Altman cited several reasons for the change, including unexpected technical challenges and a desire to better prepare for what he described as “unprecedented demand” for GPT-5.

He also hinted that the new model would surpass initial expectations, stating, “The most exciting reason is that we are going to be able to make the GPT-5 much better than we originally thought.”

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 comment came after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Wednesday hinted at enhancements to ChatGPT’s recently launched image-generation tool, which has seen a significant surge in recent days.

ChatGPT has crossed 130 million users, generating over 700 million images since March 27.

The move is an attempt to maintain its competitive edge as it faces growing competition in the open-source space from Meta and Chinese rival DeepSeek.

The Chinese low-cost model, DeepSeek, was developed in two months, with an investment of less than $6 million. This starkly contrasts the $100 million OpenAI reportedly spent on training its GPT-4 model.

DeepSeek’s R1 model offers developers, researchers, and organisations seeking AI solutions $0.55 per million input tokens and $2.19 per million output tokens. For comparison, OpenAI charges $15 per million input tokens and $60 per output token, ET reported in January.