OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has implied that the subsequent ChatGPT version will not be ChatGPT 6 after all — it will be GPT 6-7, with a wink that reacts to Gen Alpha vernacular.
What a time for the reference to become pertinent to Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year 2025. Indeed, “6 7” is just the intergenerational internet banter of the moment.
Altman’s X preamble was only a few letters long: the following version was identified as “GPT 6-7.” Whether this was supposed to be extremely grave or just good fun with a contagious catchphrase, the takeaway from the company’s post was one it had sounded numerous times before: the names of its models and products are not fixed.
The company had previously sent skins, from GPT-4 to GPT-4 Turbo to GPT-4 Generator, and its ChatGPT product keeps its own distinct name. “GPT 6-7,” put in that perspective, is not entirely a shift: in a series of characteristically playful, attention-grabbing titles, it is the similarity of the latest entry.
In addition, it underlines another point: OpenAI has not revealed any technical information concerning the subsequent product. A name alteration, whether tongue-in-cheek or not, means little: it does not tell one about the parameters, or more data, or competencies. The message is cultural rather than architectural.
Altman’s tease and the cultural meaning behind “6 7”
The textbook description of “That didn’t take long” is from: “Why 6 7 is suddenly everywhere” by Tristan Greene, JPR.
Pronounced “six-seven,” the phrase took over TikTok and school hallways through memes, a hand gesture with palms flipping down and up, and the earworm track “Doot Doot” by Skrilla. It’s a consciously vague term — occasionally used as a shrug or to hammer a joke, and frequently used to imply nothing else. That’s by design, which explains why it confounded mothers, fathers, and overjoyed boys or girls.
Dictionary.com calling “6 7” Word of the Year 2025 cemented just how youth online culture can twist and distort popular language norms. The decision did not urge parents to gorge on semantic argumentation but instead celebrated a memetic signal: non-contextual play. Teachers whined about in-class abstractions, while TikTok techniques and 67 Kid remixes racked up untold hits, indicating how rapidly a gesture–sound-bite combo may permeate popular culture.
Branding genius or viral in-joke
If OpenAI truly shipped a model dubbed GPT 6-7, it’d signify a unique moment where frontier tech attention leans keenly on a joke that you truly only enjoy when you understand the meme. That may be effective. Marketing literature frequently franchises distinct, somewhat puzzling titles to support recall, particularly when they fall on a current cultural wave. But there’s a danger: slang burns quickly. What’s cleverly lately is uncool tomorrow. Tech history is a segment with cheeky designs and numbering tics — Apple jumped from iPhone 8 to iPhone X, Microsoft avoided Windows 9, and Google renamed Bard to Gemini to better contest produced expression perception with capacity. OpenAI’s own change to GPT-4o emphasized multimodality in the design. GPT 6-7 could meet this blueprint: unpredictable, stuck in mind, and just coherent enough to register.
There’s also a strategic benefit. The AI model race is crowded with incremental version numbers — voice assistants, vision apps, chatbots, GANs, whose multiples blur together. A name that sparks conversation earns organic reach — something traditional launches pay dearly to achieve. Even if Altman’s comment was a wink, modern AI marketing, it seems to me, says it depends on that cultural fluency as much as relative benchmark wins.
What matters for users in the next model cycle
For users, the takeaway is straightforward: don’t read technical meaning into a meme-driven moniker. OpenAI has shared no specs for its next model, and the company’s recent releases emphasized reliability, multimodality, and cost-performance improvements over flashy names. The firm previously reported 100 million weekly active users for ChatGPT, regularly counts more than three-quarters of Bubble’s monthly active users, and has claimed deep penetration across the Fortune 500, so expectations for the next upgrade will be high even without a label to love. What matters most is the capabilities package:
- Faster responses
- More grounded reasoning
- Better tool use
- Smoother voice/assistant and vision features
If we get those, then “GPT 6-7” will be applauded as a clever on-ramp to a serious model. If we don’t, then “GPT 6-7” will be tagged as a fleeting meme stuck to a release cycle. Altman’s quip surfaced an odd truth about AI in 2025: the most advanced systems in the world co-exist with a youth-driven internet that speaks in remixable fragments. A model name that nods to “6 7” collapses that distance. Whether GPT 6-7 ships as labeled or not, the episode demonstrated how the language of the feed is reshaping the language of frontier technology.
