OpenAI will release Orion in December: Early Access for Partners

OpenAI will release Orion in December, giving partners early access to help develop the product before integrating ChatGPT.

OpenAI plans to release Orion, its next frontier model, in December. OpenAI will not initially make Orion available through ChatGPT, unlike its previous two models, GPT-4o and o1.

Someone with knowledge of the plan says OpenAI wants to give its partners first access to create their products and features.

The Verge also heard from a source that Microsoft engineers are getting ready to host Orion on Azure as early as November. Microsoft is OpenAI’s main partner for deploying AI models.

OpenAI sees Orion as the next step after GPT-4, but it’s unclear if the company will refer to it as GPT-5 outside the company. The release date could slip, as always. For this story, OpenAI and Microsoft both declined to say anything.

An executive at OpenAI has hinted that Orion could be up to 100 times more powerful than GPT-4. This is a different model from the O1 reasoning model that OpenAI released in September.

Over time, the company aims to integrate its LLMs to create a more sophisticated model, potentially known as artificial general intelligence or AGI.

Previous reports claimed that OpenAI was using fake data from o1, code-named Strawberry, to train Orion. A person familiar with the matter told The Verge that OpenAI researchers celebrated their completion of training the new model with a happy hour in September.

Sam Altman Hints at Big Changes Amid Orion’s Arrival

That fits with a vague post on X by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said he was “excited for the winter constellations to rise soon.” The ChatGPT o1-preview indicates that Altman is referring to the constellation Orion in his post.

November to February is the best time to see Orion, the winter constellation, but Altman also suggests rearranging the letters to form the word “ORION.”

OpenAI just finished a historic $6.6 billion funding round, which means the company needs to change its structure to become a for-profit business. The release of this new model comes at a crucial time for the company.

The company is also experiencing a significant loss of employees. CTO Mira Murati just quit, and so did Bob McGrew, who is the chief research officer, and Barret Zoph, who is the vice president of post-training.