Breaking: Mysterious New Model Sparks Speculation—Is OpenAI About to Open Source?}
A new mysterious model named 'Cypher Alpha' appears on OpenRouter, supporting 1 million tokens and reasoning. Netizens speculate it might be an OpenAI project or an open-source breakthrough.
OpenRouter has just launched a mysterious new model supporting 1 million tokens of context. Guess which company it belongs to?
Recently, a new model named "Cypher Alpha" appeared on OpenRouter. It is free to use, supports 1 million tokens of context, and has reasoning capabilities.
Note: OpenRouter is an API router for large models, aiming to integrate various AI models and services into a unified interface.
Model link: https://openrouter.ai/openrouter/cypher-alpha:free
People's reactions to this news are like this:
After all, models ending with 'Alpha' have repeatedly been suspected to originate from OpenAI. For example, the two mysterious models Optimus Alpha and Optimus Alpha previously launched on OpenRouter were suspected to be from OpenAI because their style closely resembles OpenAI’s top models, and their tool invocation IDs match OpenAI’s format.
So, the same naming pattern this time makes many think OpenAI is releasing a new model again.
Although not officially claimed, many believe this is a quiet test of an upcoming open-source version by OpenAI. Despite the stealthy label, it’s hard to ignore.
This model mainly collects user feedback and is a general-purpose model supporting long-context tasks, including code generation.
Since the origin of this large model is not publicly disclosed, curious netizens have started guessing. Most suspect it’s from OpenAI.
Rohan Paul, a well-known blogger, believes it might be GPT-5 or an open-source model.
Some also speculate it’s from Elon Musk’s Grok, especially with rumors that Grok 4 is coming soon.
However, this guess was quickly dismissed because the model answered incorrectly on the word 'strawberry'—a simple test that Grok 3 handled correctly. Grok 4 should perform even better.
Some users think the model’s performance is poor, with weak reasoning and unsatisfactory coding abilities.
Netizens are praying it’s not from OpenAI.
However, some are optimistic about this model, having conducted 20 comprehensive tests across five categories: coding, reasoning, language, stress testing, and consistency. The results show all coding tests passed, 4 out of 5 reasoning tests passed, and all language tests passed. Many believe this model is suitable for developers, writers, and students, though complex math and logical outputs still need verification. Since it’s free, the overall performance is acceptable.
More details can be found at: https://x.com/Distractosphere/status/1940132000087560197
Finally, we also tested the model ourselves. Due to unclear initial prompts, the model did not understand at first, but after refining the prompts, it responded correctly.
However, in the next two questions, the model answered incorrectly, even though these questions have been optimized for many models. It seems the model’s performance still needs improvement.
What do you think this model belongs to? Feel free to leave your comments.