Altman teases GPT-5 release, announces ChatGPT PLUS free to college students
OpenAI’s Sam Altman said the start-up’s ChatGPT Plus service, which regularly costs $20 a month, will be offered free to millions of college students until the end of May, but only in the US and Canada.
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OpenAI’s Sam Altman has teased the release of its highly anticipated GPT-5 model. Altman also announced the company was making its ChatGPT Plus service free to US and Canadian college students through May 31st.
Altman, who had announced the no-cost news Thursday afternoon on X, said the upgraded ChatGPT Plus service, which regularly costs about $20 a month, will be free to all college students in the US and Canada until the end of May.
ChatGPT Plus subscription benefits include general access to ChatGPT – even during peak times, faster response times, and priority access to new features and improvements, OpenAI states.
“This is a game-changer for students diving into research, learning, or building side projects. Kudos to @sama and the team for lowering the barrier to advanced tools – education should be empowered, not gated.” PhD Researcher and AI Strategist Syed Ijlal Hussain commented on Altman’s post.
This is a game-changer for students diving into research, learning, or building side projects. Kudos to @sama and the team for lowering the barrier to advanced tools—education should be empowered, not gated. 💡📚 #AIforEducation #ChatGPT
undefined Syed Ijlal Hussain (@sijlalhussain) April 3, 2025
GPT-5 summer release
Altman then took to X on Friday to announce some upcoming changes to various ChatGPT version releases, including the most powerful GPT-5 .
“Change of plans: we are going to release o3 and o4-mini after all, probably in a couple of weeks, and then do GPT-5 in a few months,” Altman posted.
The OpenAI co-founder and CEO explained the reasoning behind the extension – “the most exciting one” being able to make the most advanced GPT-5 model “much better than we originally thought.”
Altman also said the Microsoft-backed AI firm wants to make sure it has “enough capacity to support what we expect to be unprecedented demand.”
change of plans: we are going to release o3 and o4-mini after all, probably in a couple of weeks, and then do GPT-5 in a few months.
undefined Sam Altman (@sama) April 4, 2025
there are a bunch of reasons for this, but the most exciting one is that we are going to be able to make GPT-5 much better than we originally…
The CEO also noted that his AI teams had found it harder than anticipated to “smoothly integrate everything" referring to the GPT-5 chatbot.
“We were able to really improve on what we previewed for o3 in many ways; i think people will be happy…,” Altman told his 3.6 million followers.
OpenAI released its most thoughtful, more emotinally connected, and least hallucinagetic 4.5 model in February to rave reviews from users. It's next version is expected to have an even “higher level of intelligence" then its predessors.