'Something unexpected': OpenAI delays open-weights model, teases surprise twist

OpenAI's CEO has now teased that something very interesting may be coming that's going to be worth the delay of the company's open-weights model. 

OpenAI has quite a history when it comes to deadlines. There have been delays, changes, and what have you, and now, we're facing another extended timeline. But it may be for good. 

Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, announced in a post on X that the company's open-weights model release will be delayed. He says to expect a summer release nonetheless, but not one in June. Curiously, he also mentions their team did "something unexpected" and he hints the wait will be worth it, without revealing other details. 

Open-weights AI models are usually models where the trained parameters are publicly available. This pretty much means that any individual or company can download these fully-trained AI systems and use them for their own projects. This removes the need for training or building a model by each company. 

Altman isn't specifically saying why the model is being delayed, but something unexpected seems to be stopping the release, and in a good sense. 

Meanwhile, the entire tech industry is in love with AI and the market is getting more and more competitive as we speak. Including the open-weights market. OpenAI has rivals in the face of Mistral, which released its first range of AI reasoning models, and Deepseek, Microsoft, and Google. All these are also deep into the open-weights AI market. 

In the meantime, many are waiting on GPT-5, which is the latest update to ChatGPT. There's no official release date announced for the update, but many analysts believe it should launch in the next couple of months, probably in July. Originally, it was expected in May, but obviously, this didn't happen. And it doesn't look likely to launch in June either (we're almost halfway through the month).