Key points
- Model is trained using more computing power than any previous releases
- Do not consider GPT-4.5 to be a frontier model: OpenAI
- Subscribers to ChatGPT Pro will gain access to GPT-4.5 in ChatGPT starting Thursday
ISLAMABAD: OpenAI announced on Thursday it is launching GPT-4.5, the much-anticipated AI model code-named Orion. GPT-4.5 is OpenAI’s largest model to date, trained using more computing power and data than any of the company’s previous releases.
According to Tech Crunch, despite its size, OpenAI notes in a white paper that it does not consider GPT-4.5 to be a frontier model.
OpenAI’s $200-a-month plan
According to Tech Crunch, subscribers to ChatGPT Pro, OpenAI’s $200-a-month plan, will gain access to GPT-4.5 in ChatGPT starting Thursday as part of a research preview. Developers on paid tiers of OpenAI’s API will also be able to use GPT-4.5 starting today. As for other ChatGPT users, customers signed up for ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Team should get the model sometime next week, an OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch.
The industry has held its collective breath for Orion, which some consider to be a bellwether for the viability of traditional AI training approaches. GPT-4.5 was developed using the same key technique — dramatically increasing the amount of computing power and data during a “pre-training” phase called unsupervised learning — that OpenAI used to develop GPT-4, GPT-3, GPT-2, and GPT-1.
Gains levelling off
According to Tech Crunch, in every GPT generation before GPT-4.5, scaling up led to massive jumps in performance across domains, including mathematics, writing, and coding. Indeed, OpenAI says that GPT-4.5’s increased size has given it “a deeper world knowledge” and “higher emotional intelligence.” However, there are signs that the gains from scaling up data and computing are beginning to level off. On several AI benchmarks, GPT-4.5 falls short of newer AI “reasoning” models from Chinese AI company DeepSeek, Anthropic, and OpenAI itself.
Expensive to run
According to Tech Crunch, GPT-4.5 is also very expensive to run, OpenAI admits — so expensive that the company says it’s evaluating whether to continue serving GPT-4.5 in its API in the long term. To access GPT-4.5’s API, OpenAI is charging developers $75 for every million input tokens (roughly 750,000 words) and $150 for every million output tokens. Compare that to GPT-4o, which costs just $2.50 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.
Bigger is better
According to WIRED, Prior to this launch, 2025 has already been filled with new AI model releases. Anthropic recently put out a hybrid reasoning model for its Claude chatbot. Before that, Chinese researchers at DeepSeek rocked Silicon Valley with their release of a powerful model trained on a tiny budget, prompting OpenAI to drop a “mini” version of its reasoning model a month ago. Alongside these new releases, OpenAI promised to invest billions into building the AI infrastructure required to fuel more massive models. And GPT-4.5 is a reiteration of this current strategy from the startup: Bigger is better.
