OpenAI says it does not intend to release an AI model codenamed Orion this year, countering recent reporting from The Verge on the AI ​​company’s roadmap.

“We have no plans to release a model codenamed Orion this year,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch via email. “We plan to release a lot of other great technology.”

OpenAI previously told TechCrunch that The Verge’s report was inaccurate, but declined to elaborate further.

The Verge reported Thursday that Orion, which is expected to be OpenAI’s next frontier model, would launch in December, and that trusted partners would be the first to get access ahead of a rollout via ChatGPT. According to The Verge, Microsoft, OpenAI’s close partner and a major investor, expects to gain access to Orion as early as November.

Orion, the next big step up from OpenAI’s current flagship, GPT-4ois according to information is partially trained on synthetic training data from o1the company’s “reasoning model”. OpenAI plans to continue developing new “GPT” models for the foreseeable future alongside reasoning models such as o1, which are seen to address fundamentally different use cases.

OpenAI’s statement leaves a lot of room for maneuver. It may be that the company’s next big model isn’t actually the Orion. Or maybe OpenAI will release a new model in December – but one less capable than the Orion.

At this point, it’s anyone’s guess.