I have a different conjecture. On May 1 Kokotajlo published a post suspecting that o3 was created from GPT-4.5 via amplification and distillation. He also implied that GPT-5 would be Amp(GPT-4.5). However, in reality the API prices of GPT-5 are similar to those of GPT-4.1, which, according to Kokotajlo, is likely a 400B-sized model, so GPT-5 is likely to be yet another model distilled from Amp(GPT-4.5) or from something unreleased. So the explanation could also be on the lines of “o3 and GPT-5 were distilled from a common source which also had this weirdness”.
I have a different conjecture. On May 1 Kokotajlo published a post suspecting that o3 was created from GPT-4.5 via amplification and distillation. He also implied that GPT-5 would be Amp(GPT-4.5). However, in reality the API prices of GPT-5 are similar to those of GPT-4.1, which, according to Kokotajlo, is likely a 400B-sized model, so GPT-5 is likely to be yet another model distilled from Amp(GPT-4.5) or from something unreleased. So the explanation could also be on the lines of “o3 and GPT-5 were distilled from a common source which also had this weirdness”.