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The Verge last night published an exclusive and seemingly well researched and sourced report (it’s great in my opinion, read it here) from journalists Kylie Robison and Tom Warren stating that OpenAI plans to launch another new frontier AI model, codenamed Orion — which may or may not be GPT-5 — by December.
Yet two hours after the article went live, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, took to X to respond by replying directly to Robison’s share of the article, writing “fake news out of control.”
Altman hasn’t elaborated much since then from what I’ve seen, and the response is notably not exactly a direct denial of the claims — he didn’t write “No” or “this is false,” much less describe which part of the detailed article is wrong: is OpenAI not working on a new frontier model called Orion? That would contradict prior reporting from outlets including The Information that it does have such an effort internally — which to my knowledge, OpenAI never directly denied. Is it not planning to release later this year?
But it is clearly an attempt to push back on the reporting as it stands.
It’s an interesting quasi-denial given how precise The Verge report is, noting specific details about Orion’s supposed release plans and the fact that it appears to be geared toward enterprise customers and possibly would be served up through an application programming interface (API) only at first:
“Unlike the release of OpenAI’s last two models, GPT-4o and o1Orion won’t initially be released widely through ChatGPT. Instead, OpenAI is planning to grant access first to companies it works closely with in order for them to build their own products and features, according to a source familiar with the plan.
Another source tells The Verge that engineers inside Microsoft — OpenAI’s main partner for deploying 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’s unclear if the company will call it GPT-5 externally.“
OpenAI’s last release of a new frontier model — o1 preview and o1-mini — occurred in early September, a little more than a month ago. Yet the wider reception of these large language models (LLMs) has been largely muted, in part because they are expensive for both the company and developers to operate, and also because they are of a new “reasoning” architecture and are more limited in many ways than OpenAI’s GPT family of models, unable at this time to accept file uploads, or to generate and analyze imagery.
A new frontier model would help OpenAI capture the limelight again from rivals including Anthropic, who just this week unveiled a promising new agentic mode called “Computer Use” and new version of its Claude family of LLMs. OpenAI is not in ppor
Whether OpenAI does end up releasing a new frontier model later this year or not, we’ll be following closely. For now, it seems, fans of the company and its models shouldn’t get their hopes up too soon.
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