Zachary's Shortform

Since they said they are training the next frontier model now (which was on May 28), probably tests on an intermediate checkpoint indicate it's not worthy of moniker "GPT-5" (which was hyped as a significant advance), and late 2025 is the plan for deployment of an even bigger model that's scaled one step further than that. So this is evidence that the late-2024/early-2025 deployment model finishing training now will be called something else like GPT-4.5. This also agrees with the recent iterative deployment buzz, a sudden GPT-5 worthy of the name would be discordant with it.

(If the currently training model was turning out too strong instead, other labs would also be approaching similarly powerful models, in which case having plans to delay to a specific distant date but not further seems strange. If training was getting unstable late into the training run, it might be too early to call a specific delay by at least half a year relative to prior plans.)

Mira Murati said publicly that "next gen models" will come out in 18 months, so your confidential source seems likely to be correct.

1. Things slow down when Ilya isn't there to YOLO in the right direction in an otherwise very high-dimensional space.