OpenAI will offer free ChatGPT users unlimited access to GPT-5

OpenAI's upcoming GPT-5 release will integrate its o3 reasoning model and be available to free users, CEO Sam Altman revealed in a roadmap he shared on X. He said the company is also working to simplify how users interact with ChatGPT. 

"We want AI to 'just work' for you; we realize how complicated our model and product offerings have gotten," Altman wrote. "We hate the model picker as much as you do and want to return to magic unified intelligence." 

In its current iteration, forcing ChatGPT to use a specific model, such as o3-mini, involves either tapping the "Reason" button in the prompt bar or one of the options present in the model picker, which appears after the chatbot answers a question. If you pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, that dropdown menu can get pretty long, with multiple models and intelligence settings to choose from.  

As for the company's roadmap, Altman says GPT-4.5 will be OpenAI's "last non-chain-thought model," meaning everything that comes after will feature the capability to solve problems by breaking them down into a series of intermediate steps. Following the release of GPT 4.5, OpenAI's primary goal is "to unify o-series models and GPT-series models by creating systems that can use all our tools, know when to think for a long time or not, and generally be useful for a very wide range of tasks."

Looking ahead to GPT-5, Altman says OpenAI will release the model "as a system that integrates a lot of our technology," including o3 and its recently released Deep Research feature. In a change of plans, OpenAI won't release o3 as a standalone model. Previously, Altman had said the new system would arrive "shortly after" o3-mini, which OpenAI made available for public use at the end of last month. 

Once GPT-5 arrives, OpenAI plans to offer free users unlimited access to the model, "subject to abuse thresholds," at "the standard intelligence setting." Plus users will get to run GPT-5 "at a higher level of intelligence," while Pro users will get to run the model at "an even higher level of intelligence." 

Altman did not provide an exact timeline for either GPT-4.5 or GPT-5, other than to say they could arrive within weeks or months.  

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