OpenAI plans to launch Orion, its next frontier model, by December, The Verge has learned.

Unlike the release of OpenAI’s last two models, GPT-4o and o1, Orion won’t initially be released widely through ChatGPT. Instead, OpenAI is planning to grant access first to companies it works closely with in order for them to build their own products and features, according to a source familiar with the plan.

Another source tells The Verge that engineers inside Microsoft — OpenAI’s main partner for deploying AI models — are preparing to host Orion on Azure as early as November. While Orion is seen inside OpenAI as the successor to GPT-4, it’s unclear if the company will call it GPT-5 externally. As always, the release plan is subject to change and could slip. Microsoft declined to comment for this story, and OpenAI initially declined.

After CEO Sam Altman called this story “fake news,” OpenAI spokesperson Niko Felix told The Verge that the company doesn’t “have plans to release a model code-named Orion this year” but that “we do plan to release a lot of other great technology.”

Orion has been teased by an OpenAI executive as potentially up to 100 times more powerful than GPT-4; it’s separate from the o1 reasoning model OpenAI released in September. The company’s goal is to combine its LLMs over time to create an even more capable model that could eventually be called artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

It was previously reported that OpenAI was using o1, code named Strawberry, to provide synthetic data to train Orion. In September, OpenAI researchers threw a happy hour to celebrate finishing training the new model, a source familiar with the matter tells The Verge.

That timing lines up with a cryptic post on X by OpenAI Altman, in which he said he was “excited for the winter constellations to rise soon.” If you ask ChatGPT o1-preview what Altman’s post is hiding, it will tell you that he’s hinting at the word Orion, which is the winter constellation that’s most visible in the night sky from November to February (but it also hallucinates that you can rearrange the letters to spell “ORION”).

The release of this next model comes at a crucial time for OpenAI, which just closed a historic $6.6 billion funding round that requires the company to restructure itself as a for-profit entity. The company is also experiencing significant staff turnover: CTO Mira Murati just announced her departure along with Bob McGrew, the company’s chief research officer, and Barret Zoph, VP of post training.

Update, October 25th: Story updated to add comments from OpenAI.