OpenAI plans to launch Orion, its next frontier model, by December, The edge have learned.
Unlike the release of OpenAI’s last two models, the GPT-4o and o1, Orion will not initially be widely released through ChatGPT. Instead, OpenAI plans to first give access to companies it works closely with to build their own products and features, according to a source familiar with the plan.
Another source says so The edge that engineers at Microsoft – OpenAI’s main partner for implementing AI models – are preparing to host Orion on Azure as early as November. While Orion is seen inside OpenAI as the successor to GPT-4, it is unclear whether the company will call it GPT-5 externally. As always, the release schedule is subject to change and may progress. Microsoft declined to comment for this story, and OpenAI initially declined.
After CEO Sam Altman called this story “fake news,” OpenAI spokesman Niko Felix said The edge that the company does not “plan to release a model codenamed Orion this year,” but that “we plan to release a lot of other great technology.”
Orion has been teased by an OpenAI executive as potentially up to 100 times more powerful than GPT-4; it is separate from the o1 reasoning model OpenAI, released in September. The company’s goal is to combine its LLMs over time to create an even more capable model that could eventually be called artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
It was previously reported that OpenAI used o1, codenamed Strawberry, to provide synthetic data to train Orion. In September, OpenAI researchers held a happy hour to celebrate the completion of training the new model, a source familiar with the matter said. The edge.
That timing aligns with a cryptic post on X by OpenAI Altman, in which he said he was “excited that the winter constellations will rise soon.” If you ask ChatGPT o1 preview what Altman’s post is hiding, it will tell you that he is hinting at the word Orion, which is the winter constellation most visible in the night sky from November to February (but it also hallucinates that you can rearrange the letters to spell “ORION”).
The release of this next model comes at a crucial time for OpenAI, which just closed a historic $6.6 billion funding round that requires the company to restructure itself as a for-profit entity. The company is also experiencing significant staff turnover: CTO Mira Murati just announced her departure, along with Bob McGrew, the company’s head of research, and Barret Zoph, VP of post training.
Update, October 25: The story has been updated to add comments from OpenAI.