OpenAI is about to launch its next-generation model Orion, which will be an important milestone in the history of its language model development. The editor of Downcodes will explain to you the latest news about Orion and its potential impact on the field of artificial intelligence.
According to The Verge, OpenAI plans to launch its next-generation model, Orion, in December. Unlike previous releases of GPT-4o and o1 models, Orion will not initially be widely released via ChatGPT. Instead, OpenAI plans to first provide access to companies that work closely with it so that those companies can build their own products and capabilities. Another source told The Verge that engineers at Microsoft — OpenAI’s main partner in deploying AI models — are preparing to host Orion on Azure as early as November.
While internally at OpenAI, Orion is viewed as the successor to GPT-4, it’s unclear whether the company will refer to it externally as GPT-5. As always, release plans are subject to change, and OpenAI and Microsoft declined to comment for this story. Orion has been hinted by an OpenAI executive that it could be up to 100 times more powerful than GPT-4; it is separate from the o1 inference model OpenAI released in September. The company aims to combine its large language models (LLMs) over time to create a more powerful model that may eventually be called artificial general intelligence (AGI).
It was previously reported that OpenAI uses o1 (codenamed Strawberry) to provide synthetic data for Orion training. A source familiar with the matter told The Verge that in September, OpenAI researchers held a happy hour event to celebrate the completion of training the new model. The timing coincides with a cryptic post on X by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in which he said he was "excited about the rising winter constellations." If you ask ChatGPT o1-preview what Altman's post is hiding, it'll tell you he's alluding to the word Orion, the constellation most visible in the night sky during the winter, from November to February (but it's also fancying you The letters can be rearranged to spell "ORION"). The release of this new model comes at a critical moment for OpenAI, which just closed a historic $6.6 billion funding round that requires the company to restructure itself into a profitable entity. The company has also experienced significant staff turnover: CTO Mira Murati just announced her departure, as well as the company's chief research officer Bob McGrew and vice president of post-training Barret Zoph.
The launch of Orion heralds a new chapter in AI technology, and its powerful performance and potential applications are worth looking forward to. Let's wait and see how Orion will change our world.