OpenAI finally streamlines its product strategy

A great glimpse into the next evolution of frontier models

So goodbye to the o3 reasoning model from OpenAI – rumored to be amazing, but will never see the light of day, given OpenAI has just announced its long overdue product streamlining. The company has heard the widespread dissatisfaction with the plethora of model choices available to its users – 7 models available in the current ChatGPT website, all with different, overlapping capabilities and limitations – and has decided to make a drastic change. Everything will revert to the original, and still more known, GPT branding. What’s more, the distinction between ‘traditional’ LLMs and ‘reasoning’ LLMs will disappear, at least for what is visible to the user. GPT-4.5, to be released next, will according to the company’s CEO be the last of the ‘traditional’ LLMs.

A Unified Product Strategy

The o3 ‘reasoning’ model release is cancelled – but this is actually great news, as the successor to GPT-4.5, now officially to be called GPT-5, will incorporate both traditional and reasoning LLM capabilities and automatically choose based on its understanding of the user’s request. What this means in practice is that the canceled o3 model will simply roll seamlessly into GPT-5, where it will coexist with OpenAI’s non-reasoning models in a way that is transparent to the user. And what’s more, OpenAI also promises all current existing capabilities that now require explicit user action to be selected (e.g., code editing through Canvas, file uploads, image uploads etc.) will all be part of the great unifying GPT-5 product.

What this means for the future of GenAI models and OpenAI’s competitors

This is actually a very big deal, both for OpenAI’s much welcome product simplification, but also for what it means for the future of GenAI. OpenAI seems to be saying that the future from now on will be one of increased reasoning capacities of models, with the traditional LLMs losing way and not being able to keep up with the more advanced reasoning models that ‘think’ in real-time. We have increasingly seen reasoning models jump ahead in ratings and benchmark scores, and we are but a couple of weeks away from DeepSeek shocking the world with the capabilities of its own reasoning model. The move by OpenAI is not just a shrewd product positioning and simplification that will please its users – although it most certainly is that too- but it is also a smart way to project future capabilities and lay down the gauntlet to its competitors; by transparently combining its advanced traditional and reasoning models into one product, they break through the confusion their recent releases have sown and show they are serious about remaining at the forefront of capabilities and public perception.

Execution will be crucial

Of course, this will all depend on robust execution, but with this move OpenAI has really reinvigorated their product strategy, and demonstrated to the entire GenAI industry that it will take more than just a lower-cost model to dislodge them. We expect similar moves from all its competitors to be announced eventually, and the gradual disappearance of traditional LLMs as the reasoning ones (aided as needed by other models behind the scenes) seem to be winning the race for state-of-the-art AI.

So enjoy o3-mini-high while it lasts, shed a tear for its even more capable o3 big brother that we will not get to see on its own, but expect a great capability leap by GPT-5 time when the combined OpenAI model team makes its debut. Until then – we can tolerate the model selection menu in OpenAI a little longer now that we know better product offerings lie ahead.