GPT-5, o3, and o4-mini Are Coming Soon

Some thoughts on what we should expect

There’s been a change of plans:

(Here’s the original plan from February 2025.)

Some random thoughts on what we should expect.

• Deep Research is really good but expensive and slow (it uses o3). o4-mini will likely be in the ballpark of o3 performance-wise but will fix those other limitations, making the best AI research assistant in the world widely available, even for free users at a limited rate. (OpenAI has learned that making stuff more available pays dividends down the line even if it loses them money in the short term, e.g., Ghibli frenzy.)
• The iteration cycles have shrunk dramatically. o1-preview was released in September 2024. Full o1 (and o1-pro) were released in December 2024. o3 will be released within two weeks (April 2025), together with o4-mini (o4 is probably ready but too costly to serve; I assume it will be integrated into GPT-5 eventually). The turnaround time between reasoning model generations (o1, o3, o4) is not 18–24 months, as between base models (GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-4, GPT-5), but 3–4 months. That’s a 6x speed-up.
• Google Gemini 2.5 — probably the top AI model in many important areas (accessible for free and readily available) — has forced OpenAI to drop the o3/o4-GPT-5…