There was a time when OpenAI’s GPT-5 upgrade for ChatGPT was expected to bring AGI, or artificial general intelligence, along with it. While AGI doesn’t have a perfectly objective explanation, with AI firms constantly shifting the goalposts, it’s essentially AI that’s better than humans at most tasks; AI that can approach any problem with a level of creativity similar to humans.
That correlation between GPT-5 and AGI has died down significantly since the early days of 2024. The ChatGPT upgrade will be significant, but it probably won’t be hyped up as AGI. Some hype already exists about the abilities of GPT-5, including intriguing teasers from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Those signs suggest that a GPT-5 release is imminent.
Speculation aside, new reports indicate that OpenAI is indeed readying the ChatGPT upgrade for August. The Verge and Axios report that GPT-5 is coming next month with a few exciting new additions, including unlimited access for the ChatGPT Free tier.
Sam Altman’s GPT-5 teasers
OpenAI’s top executive has toured Washington, D.C., this week, ahead of President Trump’s America AI Action Plan. Every AI firm need the support of the U.S. government, including OpenAI. They want infrastructure investments, fewer regulations, and protection from China. In the process, Altman made several exciting comments about the arrival of GPT-5 in ChatGPT. “I am very interested in what it means to give everybody on Earth like a free copy of GPT-5 running for them all the time,” Altman said at the Federal Reserve this week.
A day later, he appeared on the This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von podcast, where he shared a GPT-5 experience he had while testing the next-gen AI model. “This morning, I was testing our new model, and I got a question. I got emailed a question that I didn’t quite understand. And I put it in the model, this is GPT-5, and it answered it perfectly,” Altman said. “And I really kind of sat back in my chair, and I was just like, ‘Oh man, here it is moment’ […] I felt like useless relative to the AI in this thing that I felt like I should have been able to do, and I couldn’t. It was really hard. But the AI just did it like that. It was a weird feeling.”
As a reminder, Altman on Saturday tweeted that he used a mysterious new AI model “for a little coding project.” The AI completed it in five minutes. “It is very, very good,” Altman teased. “Not sure how I feel about it,” he concluded without revealing other details. Altman did say on X that GPT-5 won’t have the same abilities as the ChatGPT version OpenAI used to win a gold medal at the International Math Olympiad.
What can GPT-5 do?
These teasers suggest ChatGPT will be even better at handling tasks, whether they concern coding or regular day-to-day chats you might have with the AI about all sorts of topics. Also interesting is the fact that Altman wants to make GPT-5 available for free without limits to any ChatGPT subscriber. ChatGPT Plus and Pro users will get access to even higher levels of intelligence than Free subscribers.
This week’s reports also indicate that GPT-5 will incorporate the various ChatGPT models you might be using now. Instead of choosing o3 for reasoning, GPT-4.1 for coding, and GPT-4o for regular chats, GPT-5 will pick the tools it needs to answer your prompt on its own. GPT-5 might also come in different versions, including mini and nano options that could be available for specific use cases. GPT-5 will power Microsoft’s Copilot as well, with some testers already spotting the new AI model out in the wild.
GPT-5 won’t be the only big ChatGPT upgrade available to users, though. OpenAI has just released ChatGPT Agent to all paid premium tiers, and the AI agent is available around the world. Agent should also be part of GPT-5. OpenAI’s open-source ChatGPT version, which was delayed a few times this summer, should launch before GPT-5, per Axios. The Verge mentions an early August release window. If both are correct, OpenAI is about to share at least a couple of announcements in the next two weeks.
