OpenAI is about to shake up the AI world once again, with a major announcement scheduled for later today that’s all but confirmed to be the long-awaited reveal of GPT-5.
The company’s latest teaser on X, “LIVE5TREAM THUSDAY 10AM PT,” swaps the ‘S’ for a ‘5’ in a move that’s about as subtle as a sledgehammer – but that’s not the only clue.
All signs point to GPT-5
The signs have been building for weeks at this point. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman first stoked the flames of excitement last month, promising the reveal of ChatGPT 5 “soon”, and speculation really ramped up this past Sunday with Altman sharing a screenshot with “ChatGPT 5” clearly visible in the corner.
The company seemingly doubled down on the upcoming announcement a day later, with the company’s head of applied research saying he’s “excited to see how the public receives GPT-5” on Monday.
This also aligns with previous rumours about the update, with The Verge’s Tom Warren reporting that OpenAI was targeting an early August launch last month – and Microsoft has allegedly been ramping up server capacity for the new model since February.
With that all said, it’s all but confirmed that we’ll be seeing ChatGPT 5 this week – but what does the upgrade actually entail?
It’s said to be a doozy of an update
While we won’t know exactly what OpenAI has planned for GPT-5 until its official reveal, we’ve already heard a lot about the upgrade – and it sounds like it’ll be a major leap forward for the generative AI tech.
The new model is expected to combine the strengths of OpenAI’s traditional GPT models with the advanced reasoning of its o-series models like o3 and o4. This means that GPT-5 should be able to automatically select the best approach for any given prompt without users having to switch between modes.
In fact, OpenAI’s Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT, recently said that the goal is for “the average person [to] not need to think about which model to use.”. In practice, this should mean that the confusing model picker in ChatGPT will disappear, replaced by a single unified experience that “just works”.
It’s also expected to be more multi-modal than ever, with support for text, voice, images and even advanced research tools in one place.
Altman has teased that features like Voice, Canvas, Search, and Deep Research will be fully integrated, and that the model will “know when to think for a long time or not, and generally be useful for a very wide range of tasks”.
What’s more, the CEO has already promised that free ChatGPT users will get unlimited access to GPT-5 at a standard intelligence level, while Plus and Pro subscribers will unlock higher levels of intelligence and more advanced features.
A huge week for OpenAI
OpenAI is seemingly on a roll this week, with the reveal of the hotly anticipated GPT-5 arriving just days after the announcement of GPT-OSS – a free, open-weight model that can run locally on a laptop or smartphone.
That alone would’ve been headline news, but the prospect of GPT-5 arriving just days later takes things to another level – and we can’t wait to see what OpenAI has to say about it later today.
