OpenAI Wants to Simplify Its AI Models Offering

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that the company wants to simplify its AI models offering after launching no less than eight new models since last year. Indeed, it’s been quite hard to keep up since the release of ChatGPT-4 in March 2023, which is the model Microsoft used to launch its own Bing Chat/Copilot assistant two years ago.

“We want AI to ‘just work’ for you; we realize how complicated our model and product offerings have gotten,” Altman posted on X yesterday. “We hate the model picker as much as you do and want to return to magic unified intelligence.”

OpenAI launched five new models in 2024 with GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, o1-preview, o1-mini, o1, and o1 pro mode, with the latter being exclusive to ChatGPT Pro subscribers. The company followed up last month with o3-mini, the successor to o1-mini, and the o3-mini-high variant that uses more reasoning effort.

OPENAI ROADMAP UPDATE FOR GPT-4.5 and GPT-5:

We want to do a better job of sharing our intended roadmap, and a much better job simplifying our product offerings.

We want AI to “just work” for you; we realize how complicated our model and product offerings have gotten.

We hate…

— Sam Altman (@sama) February 12, 2025

Put simply, this is probably a bit too much even for the biggest AI enthusiasts out there.

According to Altman, OpenAI’s next new model will be GPT-4.5, which the company calls “Orion” internally. “After that, a top goal for us is to unify o-series models and GPT-series models by creating systems that can use all our tools, know when to think for a long time or not, and generally be useful for a very wide range of tasks,” the exec explained.

GPT-4.5 will be followed by GPT-5, which will integrate technology from o3. The latter is OpenAI’s smartest AI model with improved reasoning skills, but Altman said that it will no longer be offered as a standalone model once GPT-5 becomes available. The latter will be available for all ChatGPT users, with paid subscribers getting more advanced reasoning capabilities.

“The free tier of ChatGPT will get unlimited chat access to GPT-5 at the standard intelligence setting (!!), subject to abuse thresholds,” Altman explained. “Plus subscribers will be able to run GPT-5 at a higher level of intelligence, and Pro subscribers will be able to run GPT-5 at an even higher level of intelligence. These models will incorporate voice, canvas, search, deep research, and more.”

Overall, this major streamlining effort sounds good on paper, and this is something OpenAI’s competitors may want to do as well if they really want to democratize these chatbots.