OpenAI has introduced a smaller, more affordable version of its artificial intelligence (AI) model ChatGPT.
Announced on Thursday (July 18), the GPT-4o mini is available now for free users and paid ChatGPT Plus and Team subscribers, with enterprise customers able to access it starting next week. It replaces the previous model, GPT-3.5 Turbo.
“GPT-4o mini outperforms GPT-3.5 Turbo and other mini models on academic benchmarks for both text intelligence and multimodal inference, and supports the same range of languages as GPT-4o,” the company said. “It also performs better on function calls, enabling developers to build applications that retrieve data or take actions in external systems, and offers improved long-context performance compared to GPT-3.5 Turbo.”
OpenAI announced GPT-4o (the “o” stands for “omni”) in May, part of a race between tech giants and startups to deploy advanced AI systems for a variety of applications.
“In our mission to enable cutting-edge technology and build the most powerful and useful applications, we of course want to continue to create cutting-edge models and push the envelope,” Olivier Godman, head of API products at OpenAI, told Bloomberg News on Thursday. “But we also want to offer the best miniaturized models.”
He added that some developers are already trying out GPT-4o mini: For example, email startup Superhuman is using it to create automated replies to messages, and financial services startup Ramp is using the model to pull information from receipts.
Meanwhile, PYMNTS reported earlier this week that OpenAI is seeking to develop human-level AI, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), a development that, according to the article, is “exciting the business world with visions of AI-powered commerce that could rewrite the rules of global trade if the technology pans out.”
According to a recent Reuters report, the company is taking a new approach to AI models in a project codenamed “Strawberry,” which aims to improve the models’ advanced inference capabilities.
While exact details and a timeline are unclear, the project is focused on enhancing AI’s ability to understand and process complex information, as the Microsoft-backed startup aims to push the boundaries of what its models can achieve.
“OpenAI’s pursuit of human-level reasoning isn’t just a technological marvel; it’s a story of pushing boundaries and creating new possibilities in every sector,” Ghazefer Mansour, founder and CEO of Technology Rivers, told PYMNTS. “For business, AI can dramatically change the way we manage supply chains, predict market trends with great accuracy, and make customer experiences hyper-personal at scale.”
