OpenAI 'Spud' release rumor

A report says OpenAI’s next internal model, codenamed “Spud,” finished pretraining on March 24 and could ship in April — a move that would affect API economics. (abhs.in) The Information first reported the pretraining completion and an internal memo in which CEO Sam Altman called the model “very strong” and said a usable version could be ready “in a few weeks.” (the-decoder.com) Prediction markets currently price about a 78 percent chance Spud ships before April 30, and several outlets place the expected release window roughly mid‑April through May 5. (polymarket.com) Coverage and analyst notes highlight that Spud is being discussed as a new base model that could change API pricing, compute requirements, and developer cost structures. (abhs.in) OpenAI has not posted any public announcement about Spud on its newsroom, and its most recent official frontier release was GPT‑5.4 on March 5, 2026. (openai.com) OpenAI President Greg Brockman has described the project as the product of roughly “two years” of research and framed it as more than an incremental update in recent public remarks. (mindstudio.ai) Multiple reports say OpenAI freed compute by winding down its text‑to‑video app Sora on or around March 24 to reallocate GPUs toward Spud training and post‑training work. (the-decoder.com) News outlets and industry trackers disagree whether Spud will be marketed as GPT‑5.5 or labeled GPT‑6; OpenAI has not confirmed a public name for the model. (grokipedia.com) The abhs.in write‑up that circulated the pretraining detail cautions the information is unofficial and urges enterprises to treat a spring Spud launch as an operational variable to plan around. (abhs.in)