- OpenAI released GPT-4.5 on Thursday.
- The model is designed to be more general-purpose than OpenAI's STEM-focused reasoning models.
- OpenAI says it's best for "tasks like writing, programming, and solving practical problems."
On Thursday, OpenAI released what it claims to be its largest and most powerful model to date: GPT-4.5.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described it in a post on X on Thursday as "the first model that feels like talking to a thoughtful person."
"I have had several moments where I've sat back in my chair and been astonished at getting actually good advice from an AI," he wrote.
Altman added in his post that the model will be "giant" and "expensive." And while OpenAI "really wanted to launch it to plus and pro at the same time — " the company's paid subscription tiers — it simply ran out of GPUs, he explained.
"We will add tens of thousands of GPUs next week and roll it out to the plus tier then," he said.
Silicon Valley has been at odds about the best way to make AI models smarter and more powerful. But GPT-4.5 makes a case for the conventional wisdom that the more data and computational resources that go into a model, the better it becomes.
OpenAI's chief research officer, Mark Chen, told the newsletter Big Technology that the company has not yet seen diminishing returns from scaling.
"We're very rigorous about how we do this," Chen said. "We make projections based on all the models we've trained before on what performance to expect, and in this case, we put together the scaling machinery, and this is the point that lies at that next order of magnitude."
And while training costs remain high, OpenAI has found less expensive ways to run increasingly big models. Inference costs "have dropped many orders of magnitude since we first launched GPT-4," Chen told Big Technology.
The basics
On Thursday, the company released GPT-4.5 in a research preview to users who pay $200 a month for ChatGPT Pro and developers in the API. Next week, OpenAI aims to bring it to ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Edu users.
In a livestream demonstration of GPT-4.5's abilities on Thursday, Amelia Glaese, a member of OpenAI's technical staff, said GPT-4.5 is the latest advancement of OpenAI's "unsupervised learning" paradigm which focuses on scaling up models on "word knowledge, intuition, and reducing hallucinations."
Meanwhile, its o1 series of reasoning models, which it released last year, are designed to think before responding and are better suited for quantitative tasks.
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It picks up better on social cues
In practice, GPT-4.5 is the most natural conversationalist and emotionally intelligent of OpenAI's models. It responds more adeptly to social cues than OpenAI's STEM-focused reasoning model, o1, as a function of its greater knowledge base and stronger contextual understanding.
Raphael Lopes, a member of OpenAI's technical staff, demonstrated how GPT-4.5 would reframe an angry text to a friend with more tact than o1.
It's tested on "vibes"
GPT-4.5 is aligned to be a "better collaborator" so conversations with it feel "warmer, more intuitive and emotionally nuanced," Lopes said. OpenAI tested GPT-4.5 against 4o, a multimodal model it released in May, on a "vibes" test set that measures creative intelligence and emotional intelligence.
It's less prone to hallucinate
GPT-4.5 outperforms other models in accuracy and produces significantly fewer hallucinations, the company said.
The model's "knowledge base, stronger alignment with user intent, and improved emotional intelligence make it well-suited for tasks like writing, programming, and solving practical problems," OpenAI said in the GPT-4.5 System Card published on Thursday.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for a comment.