I said earlier this week that ChatGPT just celebrated its second birthday, yet OpenAI failed to deliver any sort of celebration. That’s in spite of CEO Sam Altman previously hinting that some announcements might be coming to mark the occasion.
It turns out that OpenAI has surprises ready for ChatGPT and its other AI projects, but the company decided to do things differently. Rather than plot announcements around ChatGPT’s second anniversary, OpenAI is holding a Christmas-centric AI event aptly called “12 Days of OpenAI.”
The event starts on Thursday, and OpenAI will hold 12 live streams, one a day, for the following two weeks. As teased on X, we’re looking at “a bunch of new things, big and small.”
OpenAI did not reveal any details about the upcoming ChatGPT surprises, so is it now a good time to get excited about GPT-5? Well, maybe. It turns out some of the surprise announcements might have leaked.
Sam Altman confirmed the 12 Days event during The New York Times’ DealBook conference on Wednesday. While the CEO didn’t confirm what’ OpenAI has planned for the event, The Verge has learned about some of the ChatGPT-related novelties coming in the next few days.
OpenAI will apparently release a new reasoning model and the text-to-video AI tool Sora that leaked a few days ago. These might be some of the bigger ChatGPT announcements, but OpenAI might offer consumers smaller surprises. The list includes a Sanda-inspired voice for ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode and a voice button design that looks like a snowflake.
The new reasoning model is easily the biggest surprise OpenAI can deliver. But it’s unclear whether we’re looking at the successor of GPT-4o, be it GPT-5 or whatever OpenAI calls it, or the full release of the o1 model. The latter is only available in preview mode.
Recent reports have claimed that all the big AI firms are struggling to train next-gen models, suggesting some announcements will be postponed to next year.
As for Sora getting a public release, that makes sense, considering what OpenAI has said earlier this year. The company confirmed that Sora will be released by the end of the year without committing to a specific timeline. Since then, Sora has leaked, as the text-to-video tool was available to certain creators.
More importantly, Google announced this week the limited release of Veo. That’s the Sora alternative Google unveiled in May, three months after OpenAI unveiled Sora. This suggests a wider Sora release is likely to happen.
I’ll also point out the recent rumors that say OpenAI is developing AI Agents that can control computer apps for users. There’s no indication such a product will be included in OpenAI’s 12 Days event. An AI Agent announcement would also qualify as a big ChatGPT surprise.
