Unless your crystal ball is working properly, you'll have spent the last few months just as confused as the rest of us to when ChatGPT's big GPT-5 upgrade will arrive. We’ve had a variety of vague hints, but Altman and his team have otherwise stayed tight lipped.
However, we're now starting to piece together an idea of when it will arrive. Through a variety of hints, leaks and vague comments from the team, the timeline is starting to fall into place.
So, we have a launch date now…? No. When it comes to OpenAI, there is no such thing as an "official launch date", with plenty of delays and changes likely to follow. But we are narrowing it down pretty quickly.
At one point, a July launch was suggested. That, based on the date right now, is looking very unlikely. However, it shouldn’t be too much longer with the new expectation being early August.
This is due to a few reasons. Outside of just the excitable fans on X, we’ve had some very real hints dropped in the world.
What we know so far
On July 19th, Sam Altman took to X to post about OpenAI’s performance using its chatbots in a maths competition.
we achieved gold medal level performance on the 2025 IMO competition with a general-purpose reasoning system! to emphasize, this is an LLM doing math and not a specific formal math system; it is part of our main push towards general intelligence.when we first started openai,… https://t.co/X46rspI4l6July 19, 2025
In this post, he stated “we are releasing GPT-5 soon but want to set accurate expectations. This [the model that scored highly on the maths test] is an experimental model that incorporates new research techniques we will use in future models. We think you will love GPT-5, but we don’t plan to release a model with IMO gold level of capability for many months."
‘Soon’ is obviously very vague and leaves room for changes in the timeline. However, the team hasn’t used that kind of terminology with GPT-5 before, suggesting we are now closing in on its release.
Altman also recently went on the Theo Von podcast, where he praised the abilities of the model, suggesting they are at the very least in testing stages of the product.
On top of that, GPT-5 use has begun to appear outside of OpenAI, with certain testers getting their hands on the code and security experts strength testing the product.
According to The Verge, we even know what versions of GPT-5 there will be with both a mini and nano version coming out at launch.
Overall thoughts
These are all just hints and rumours at this point. As we mentioned above, OpenAI has a tendency for delays or changing their timeline entirely.
However, it is clear that the release of GPT-5 is imminent, closing in over the next month or two. When it does arrive, we're expecting to see a load of improvements, including better reasoning and planning, more natural interactions and an increase in context length. And almost certainly improvements in image and video generation.
As soon as it is here, we will be bringing you all of the latest news, as well as reviews of the product and our favourite ways to use GPT-5 to boost your productivity.
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