Another source tells The Verge that engineers inside Microsoft — OpenAI’s main partner for deploying AI models — are preparing to host Orion on Azure as early as November. While Orion is seen inside OpenAI as the successor to GPT-4, it’s unclear if the company will call it GPT-5 externally. As always, the release plan is subject to change and could slip. Microsoft declined to comment for this story, and OpenAI initially declined.