ChatGPT GPT-5 upgrade may be close as Sam Altman posts a mysterious teaser

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OpenAI started rolling out the GPT-4o Voice Mode it unveiled in May to select ChatGPT Plus users. The voice upgrade will be released to more ChatGPT users in the coming months. But OpenAI might be preparing an even bigger update for ChatGPT, a new foundation model that might be known as GPT-5. That’s assuming OpenAI is ready to move on from the GPT-4 naming scheme it’s been using in the past two years.

Whatever the ChatGPT upgrade might be called, Sam Altman has just teased it on social media. The CEO posted an image on X showing strawberries in his garden. “I love summer in the garden,” he captioned the update.

That could always be a tweet about a garden, sure. But if you’re familiar with the reports out there, you know that Strawberry is one of the internal codenames used for this next-gen ChatGPT model upgrade. Before Strawberry came to light, we were aware of a ChatGPT Q* (Q-Star) model that appeared around the time Altman was fired last November. This internal work was believed to be associated with the GPT-5 upgrade.

Altman did not provide additional details about his photo other than to say it wasn’t created with ChatGPT. When asked what prompt he used for it, the exec said it was an actual photo of his garden.

Considering that most strawberries in that image are ripe, Altman might be telling the world that Strawberry could launch soon. The “summer” detail can indicate a summer release for this ChatGPT upgrade.

According to a Reuters report from a few weeks ago, Strawberry has more advanced capabilities than GPT-4o, which is currently the best commercial ChatGPT version. Strawberry features better reasoning capabilities and improved research, the report said.

OpenAI has never confirmed Strawberry, but the company recently held an internal all-hands meeting where it demoed a ChatGPT project with “human-like reasoning.”

There’s also the possibility that Altman is just trolling ChatGPT users with the photo, as he must be aware of all the speculation around Strawberry and GPT-5.

However, as the CEO posted the strawberry summer image on X, others took to the social platform to detail another mysterious genAI product that’s in testing at the time of this writing on the open-source lmsys chatbot arena. The last time we saw a mysterious chatbot with superior abilities, we discussed a “gpt2-chatbot.” Soon after that, OpenAI unveiled GPT-4o.

This time, VentureBeat reports there’s an “anonymous-chatbot” available for testing. Users who have asked it to identify itself got a response like the one above. The anonymous model is based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 architecture. The model has been “fine-tuned for chat-based interactions.”

Unsurprisingly, the chatbot doesn’t identify as GPT-5 or anything else. However, some users have found it to be better at reasoning than GPT-4o and other rivals.

That’s not enough to tell us that OpenAI is testing GPT-5 in the wild. Also, there’s no telling whether OpenAI will ever use GPT-5 as a name for the next ChatGPT upgrade. In the past, GPT-5 was associated with AGI or artificial general intelligence. That’s AI that can reason as well as a human. It’s too early to tell whether we’re getting anywhere near that.

Strawberry Gardens and chatbot tests aside, I’ll remind you that we’re moving quickly in this industry. If OpenAI thinks its next ChatGPT upgrade is ready, we’ll probably see it roll out. Everyone else in the industry is developing more advanced chatbots, so OpenAI can’t afford to wait too long to release its next ChatGPT model. We’ll just have to wait and see what the summer brings in terms of new genAI capabilities.