OpenAI Season As the AI industry gets more and more crowded — and its hype more diffuse — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has quietly announced that the company won’t be releasing its super-advanced new reasoning model as a standalone product. In a statement posted on his arch-nemesis Elon Musk’s social network, Altman wrote circuitously around the previously slated launch of o3, the latest awkwardly-named version of its frontier reasoning model that’s said to sometimes cost more than $1,000 worth of computing power per query. “In both ChatGPT and our API, we will release GPT-5 as a system that integrates a lot of our technology, including o3,” the CEO said. “We will no longer ship o3 as a standalone model.” That buried bit of the lengthy statement is, as TechCrunch flagged, a stark reversal from recent comments from OpenAI executives who claimed that o3’s full, standalone launch was slated for launch in February or March. According to Altman, this product launch mixup is part of a greater drive to simplify what OpenAI is selling. “We realize,” he wrote, “how complicated our model and product offerings have gotten.” Be that as it may, scuttling o3 this close to its purported launch — and so soon after the Chinese AI company DeepSeek issued a ringing blow to OpenAI and every other mainstream AI company with its claims of a low-energy, high-powered chatbot — seems telling. Since unleashing ChatGPT onto the world in November 2022, OpenAI has struggled to create as many waves as that…As Hype Fades, OpenAI Suddenly Cancels Release of Its Hot Upcoming AI