Goodbye, GPT. Hello, Reasoning ‘O’

On Halloween, a Reddit user asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman whether “GPT-5” was coming, as well as the full version of the company’s o1 reasoning model—a preview version of which went on sale seven weeks ago. 

In other words, when would the public see the company’s next flagship large language model? 

Altman answered, “we are prioritizing shipping o1 and its successors,” and added that limited computing resources meant that it was difficult to launch too many things in parallel. 

We didn’t think much of it at the time. But now we have a better understanding of Altman’s comment—and why he is focused on launching an o-branded reasoning model rather than another version of GPT. That acronym stands for a generative pretrained transformer model (aka an LLM) that became the bedrock of ChatGPT and most other generative artificial intelligence products.

The reason? The pace of improvement of GPTs is slowing down, as we reported Saturday, with new details about the development of Orion, the next big GPT. And now that OpenAI has the ability to bake reasoning into GPTs such as Orion, it may start branding these models as part of the “o” family.