Sam Altman’s OpenAI Confirms GPT-5 Is About to Drop

OpenAI dropped a teaser tweet today featuring a minimalist 7-second video where the text “GPT-4o” repeatedly appears on a white background before gradually transitioning—through subtle fades and accents—to “GPT-5.” The post, captioned simply “Dropping soon,” garnered over 11,000 likes, and has been watched over half a million times within hours.

GitHub leaks that surfaced earlier this week revealed four variants in development: a base GPT-5 for logic and multi-step tasks, gpt-5-mini for efficiency, gpt-5-nano for low-latency applications, and gpt-5-chat tailored for enterprise conversations. The leaks mentioned features like “enhanced agentic capabilities” for handling complex coding with minimal prompting—essentially an AI that takes initiative rather than waiting for detailed instructions.

The base GPT-5 supposedly handles multi-step logic and autonomous decision-making with minimal user input, acting more like what the leaks called an “initiative-taking intelligence.” The model, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said months ago, is expected to unify the reasoning process and the normal token prediction in one powerful, hybrid model capable of merging what today are the “GPT” and the “o” architectures into one.

The unified architecture represents a significant shift from OpenAI’s current approach. Instead of users manually selecting between different models, GPT-5 will automatically route queries to the appropriate internal model version or research method. The system combines text, vision, and audio processing in a single neural network, rather than the current pipeline of separate models.

And if we’re to trust the leaks, the benchmarks look pretty interesting, with GPT-5 being by far the most powerful AI model in different tasks.

OpenAI’s head of applied research expressed excitement yesterday about seeing “how the public responds to GPT-5,” while warning that infrastructure scaling has caused delays from earlier expectations. The company released two open-weight models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, earlier this week—the latter capable of running locally on consumer PCs—potentially as a precursor to the main event.

The reactions ranged from pure hype to healthy skepticism. Some users posted memes of eager anticipation with comments begging OpenAI to “drop it” already, while others worried about access tiers. “GPT-5 will probably only be available to high tier subscriptions. What’s the point when we can’t even use?” one frustrated user wrote, with others posting copium screenshots of the model being available for Plus and Free tier users.

For the doubters still clinging to ambiguity, we decided to ask ChatGPT directly what the teaser meant. The bot didn’t mince words: “The transition from GPT-4o to GPT-5 in the video clearly indicates the announcement of the next-generation model.” When pressed further about whether this was definitely GPT-5, it added that the visual progression “leaves little room for alternative interpretation.”