Sam Altman replies to China and announces free access to ChatGPT5: “We want AI to ‘just work’ for you”
The launch by a Chinese start-up of DeepSeek has rattled the industry and sent the likes of OpenAI scrambling which means some good news for users.
Towards the end of January, a little-known Chinese start-up launched DeepSeek, a low-cost open-source AI model. According to its creators its performance is comparable if not superior to AI models available from big name companies in the industry who have spent billions on their own AI models.
The fact that DeepSeek was developed for pennies on the dollar on top of its viral success, topping the download charts in Apple and Google app stores, spooked tech investors and wiped a trillion dollars off the tech-heavy Nasdaq. Furthermore, the meteoric rise of DeepSeek sent leading firms scrambling and prompted the likes of Alibaba and OpenAI to move up the release dates of new versions of their AI models.
That’s good news for AI users as it means more competition and as well as opening up free access to more powerful models. Baidu announced on Thursday that their Ernie Bot will be available for free on April 1. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, posted on social media that when it comes out, ChatGPT-5 will also be free for all users saying, “we want AI to ‘just work’ for you.”
What will be available on ChatGPT5?
Altman announced that OpenAI wants to “return to magic unified intelligence.” Realizing that the company’s model and product offerings have become complicated, OpenAI plans to “do a better job of sharing our intended roadmap, and a much better job simplifying our product offerings.”
Coming up next from OpenAI will be ChatGPT-4.5, which is known internally as Orion. He said that this will be the last non-chain-of-thought model. The “top goal” after that is to unify o-series and GPT-series models which will create systems that can use all of the tools available “and generally be useful for a very wide range of tasks.”
According to Altman, these will include the following:
- Voice interaction
- Visual ‘canvas’ tool
- Search
- Deep research
These will be rolled out with ChatGPT-5 in both ChatGPT and OpenAI’s API. While the free tier of ChatGPT will get unlimited chat access to ChatGPT-5, this will only be at the standard intelligence setting and “subject to abuse thresholds.”
Those with subscriptions to ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Pro will get access to a more advanced version of ChatGPT-5 and higher levels of intelligence depending on which service users are paying for.