OpenAI plans Orion AI model release for December

OpenAI plans to launch Orion, its next frontier model, by December. The edge has learned.

Unlike the release of OpenAI's last two models, GPT-4o and o1, Orion will not initially be widely released via ChatGPT. Instead, OpenAI plans to initially provide access to companies it works closely with so they can develop their own products and features, according to a source familiar with the plan.

Another source tells The edge that engineers at Microsoft – OpenAI's primary partner for deploying AI models – are preparing to host Orion on Azure as early as November. While Orion is considered the successor to GPT-4 within OpenAI, it is unclear whether the company will refer to it as GPT-5 externally. As always, the release schedule is subject to change and may slip. OpenAI and Microsoft declined to comment for this story.

Orion was touted by an OpenAI executive as potentially being up to 100 times more powerful than GPT-4; It is different from the o1 reasoning model OpenAI, which was released in September. The company's goal is to combine its LLMs over time to create an even more powerful model that could eventually be called artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

It was previously reported that OpenAI was using o1, codenamed “Strawberry,” to provide synthetic data for training Orion. In September, OpenAI researchers held a happy hour to celebrate the completion of training of the new model, a source familiar with the matter reports The edge.

This timing is consistent with a cryptic post by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on X in which he said he was “excited about the winter constellation process coming soon.” If you ask ChatGPT o1-preview what Altman's post hides, you will learn that he alludes to the word Orion, the winter constellation that is most visible in the night sky from November to February (but it also hallucinates that you can rearrange it) . the letters to spell “ORION”).

Even ChatGPT thinks Sam Altman is teasing Orion.
Screenshot by Tom Warren / The Verge

The release of this next model comes at a crucial time for OpenAI, which just closed a historic $6.6 billion funding round that will require it to restructure the company as a for-profit company. The company is also experiencing significant staff turnover: CTO Mira Murati just announced her departure, along with Bob McGrew, the company's chief research officer, and Barret Zoph, VP of post training.

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