OpenAI says that it doesn’t intend to release an AI model code-named Orion this year, countering recent reporting from The Verge on the AI company’s roadmap.
“We don’t have plans to release a model code-named Orion this year,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch via email. “We do plan to release a lot of other great technology.”
OpenAI previously told TechCrunch that The Verge’s report wasn’t accurate, but declined to elaborate further.
The Verge reported on Thursday that Orion, which is expected to be OpenAI’s next frontier model, would launch by December, and that trusted partners would be the first to gain access ahead of a rollout through ChatGPT. According to The Verge, Microsoft, OpenAI’s close collaborator and a major investor, expects to gain access to Orion as early as November.
Orion, the next major step up from OpenAI’s current flagship, GPT-4o, is reportedly trained in part on synthetic training data from o1, the company’s “reasoning” model. OpenAI plans for the foreseeable future to continue developing new “GPT” models alongside reasoning models like o1, which it sees as addressing fundamentally different use cases.
OpenAI’s statement leaves substantial wiggle room. It could be that the company’s next major model isn’t, in fact, Orion. Or perhaps OpenAI will release a new model by December — but one less capable than Orion.
At this point, it’s anyone’s guess.
