OpenAI could be about to announce its most powerful AI model to date on the final day of its 12 Days of OpenAI extravaganza. The new model is the next generation "reasoner", replacing o1, released last week.

A report from The Information suggests it could be called o3, skipping o2 as that is the name of a telecom company in the UK. This was backed up by a cryptic post on X from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, stating "Should have said oh oh oh."

We don't know anything about the new model but some experts suggest it could be capable of solving evaluation tests designed to determine whether a model is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), something all AI labs are working towards.

Declaring a model as AGI (something Altman said would be achieved in 2025) would allow OpenAI to terminate its long-standing contract with Microsoft and renegotiate more favorable terms with the tech giant.

We will find out at 1pm ET (6pm GMT, 5am ACT) whether this is one giant leap for AI or a small step for ChatGPT.

This new announcement could be a significant step forward in AI reasoning, an area where OpenAI's o series has already distinguished itself. However, even there it is facing competition from Google -- with its new Gemini Flash Thinking model.

OpenAI's o series of models work slightly differently from the GPT family, such as GPT-4o. For example, o1 is focused on reasoning and problem-solving, using chain-of-thought to solve problems. In contrast, GPT-4o is trained to process and generate multiple modalities through a unified neural network.

Part of what makes o1 different is the switch to focusing on post-training. OpenAI is using tools to improve how they handle specific tasks and learn from problems. This is known as reinforcement learning, something they confirmed would be available to developers during day 2 of the 12-Days event.

Altman has previously hinted at a merging of the capabilities, thought to be the rumored "Orion" project. It isn't clear whether today's announcement will be that but with a new name, or whether o3 is simply a better version of o1.

We seem to be skipping o2 completely due to the British telecom company of the same name. o2 even announced an AI project recently, using generative speech to keep scammers on the phone with a virtual old lady.