OpenAI's GPT-4.5 emerges as costly yet creative AI

OpenAI's newest AI model, GPT-4.5, has been released as a research preview, boasting enhanced creativity and a more "natural" conversational style.

According to OpenAI, it recognises patterns, draws connections, and makes creative insights better than previous versions.

GPT-4.5 has a broader knowledge base and improved "EQ" (emotional intelligence), making it more useful for creative tasks and solving practical problems.

OpenAI states it should "hallucinate less and deliver more reliable performance across a wide range of general topics, including richer conversations."

However, this model isn't designed for detailed, step-by-step logic, especially when compared to OpenAI’s o-series models.

The trade-off is that it lacks "chain-of-thought reasoning and can be slower due to its size," and it doesn’t produce multimodal output like audio or video, according to OpenAI.

"It is more like a personality, communication, and creativity upgrade than a huge intelligence leap," noted Dan Shipper, CEO of AI and the business newsletter Every.

"It’s like OpenAI is pivoting its base model from ‘bland assistant’ to ‘AI bestie,’" he added, but also mentioned that GPT-4.5 is "sometimes worse" at following instructions.

AI researcher Aran Komatsuzaki indicated that accessing the API for GPT-4.5 costs around 15 to 20 times more than GPT-4o.

"OpenAI GPT-4.5 pricing is insane," commented Ashutosh Shrivastava, founder of the AI Compass newsletter.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that the model "won’t crush benchmarks" and is a "giant expensive model."

Despite concerns about the cost, Professor Derya Unutmaz of The Jackson Laboratory found GPT-4.5 to be "remarkable" in medical image diagnosis, correctly identifying a tubal ectopic pregnancy where other AI models failed 

GPT-4.5 is available to ChatGPT Pro subscribers for $200 per month and will be rolled out to Plus and Team users next week, followed by Enterprise and Edu users.