OpenAI has decided to simplify its product offerings. A month after announcing the in-development GPT-o3 as its next frontier model, the company has canceled it as a standalone release, explaining that it would be integrated into the upcoming GPT-5 instead. “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,” OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman wrote in a social media post this week. Expected to ship later this year, the GPT-5 models will incorporate voice, canvas, search, deep research and more, OpenAI says.

OpenAI’s next model release will be GPT-4.5, the model internally known as Orion, which is expected to ship over the next few weeks as the company’s “last non-chain-of-thought model,” Altman revealed in a post on X.

“Unlike o3 and OpenAI’s other ‘reasoning’ models, non-chain-of-thought models tend to be less reliable in domains like math and physics,” TechCrunch reports.

GPT-5 will integrate various OpenAI technologies in both ChatGPT and the company’s API. “The free tier of ChatGPT will get unlimited chat access to GPT-5 at the standard intelligence setting, subject to abuse thresholds,” according to Altman, while Plus and Pro subscribers will be able to use it at even higher levels of intelligence.

“OpenAI is fully embracing the reasoning model trend it arguably kickstarted” with the September release of its first reasoning model, OpenAI o1, TechCrunch writes. Reasoning models have the ability to fact-check themselves, which makes them more reliable than other types of models. The price is higher latency — seconds to minutes more to produce responses.

VentureBeat calls the release shuffle “a rare admission from a tech company that its product releases haven’t been differentiated enough for customers.” In addition to having the GPT-4o, OpenAI o1, o3 and o3-mini models in various stages of release or preview, OpenAI has also made ChatGPT subscription tiers available, including the $200 per month ChatGPT Pro.

“On top of all that, the company has released Operator agent, Deep Research, ChatGPT tasks and a host of other new features that are sometimes only available through specific models or paid levels,” explains VentureBeat.

TechCrunch contextualized OpenAI’s product consolidation in light of the Chinese release of DeepSeek-R1, a low-cost, open-source model that “matched o1 on a number of benchmarks,” writing “Altman admitted that DeepSeek has lessened OpenAI’s technological lead in AI.”