It’s a stopgap. If we get through this election without a major public freak out, it gives the industry 4 more years to take LLMs out to the point of diminishing returns and figure out safety before we get knee jerk regulation.
The reason the name was changed was because there was a big public scare about gpt-5 taking over and so Altman had to promise not to release gpt-5 soon. So they changed the name to gpt-4o (omni). Which is A) obviously dramatically a different architecture, B) a huge step up in capabilities (most still unreleased) C) very general purpose. Because of A) and B), this should obviously be a new major version (5).
Yes, this is speculation, but it's very obvious speculation to me. It's weird for me that most people not only don't share this view but seem to absolutely hate when I say it.
That combined with the voice was probably considered AGI by Ilya.
If you've used 4 and 4o they are too similar for 4o to have been trained from scratch