OpenAI to Release Orion, Its Next Big AI Model, in December

OpenAI plans to launch Orion, its next major AI model, in December, according to The Verge.

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

Another source told The Verge 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’s unclear whether the company will call it GPT-5. As always, release plans are subject to change. Both OpenAI and Microsoft declined to comment for this story.

Orion was previously described by an OpenAI executive as potentially 100 times more powerful than GPT-4; it is separate from the o1 reasoning model that 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 celebrated the completion of training the new model, a source familiar with the matter told The Verge.

That timing coincides with a mysterious X post by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in which he said he was “eagerly awaiting the arrival of the winter constellations.” If you ask ChatGPT o1-preview what Altman’s post is implying, you’ll learn that he’s referring to Orion, the winter constellation most visible in the night sky from November to February.

The release of this next model comes at a crucial time for OpenAI, which just closed a historic $6.6 billion funding round that required it to restructure 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 chief research officer, and Barret Zoph, its vice president of post-training.