OpenAI had previously planned for June release, and then postponed it to «later this summer,» claiming great progress and that the team was «excited» about the new model.
Very good, or just recycled o-series?
It was supposed to be a «very good model,» but «our research team did something unexpected and quite amazing,» @sama said on June 11.
TechCrunch is estimating today that the model would be similar in reasoning capabilities to their o-series of models, but that is a whole range of AIs with varying performance.
Open source cold feet
It now appears OpenAI is getting somewhat cold feet about the reality of what could happen once people get to tinker with the priorities of a state of the art model, with Altman saying they need more time to run additional safety tests.
we planned to launch our open-weight model next week.
we are delaying it; we need time to run additional safety tests and review high-risk areas. we are not yet sure how long it will take us.
while we trust the community will build great things with this model, once weights are…
— Sam Altman (@sama) July 12, 2025
As you can tell from this tweet — there is no longer any timeline for a release, and it might take until well after summer.
Read more: Sam Altman’s tweet, and a writeup on TechCrunch, and teknotum on the previous delay.