The world of artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly, and OpenAI has once again pushed the boundaries with the release of GPT-4.5. This latest AI model, code-named Orion, has been eagerly anticipated by industry experts, researchers, and tech enthusiasts.
As the newest and most advanced iteration of OpenAI’s generative models, GPT-4.5 has been trained on vast amounts of data and computing power, making it the largest model OpenAI has ever developed. Despite its impressive capabilities, OpenAI has made it clear that GPT-4.5 is not considered a frontier model. Instead, it serves as an intermediate step before the company shifts toward new AI development strategies.
Subscribers to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pro plan, which costs $200 per month, now have early access to GPT-4.5 as part of a research preview. Developers using OpenAI’s API can also experiment with the model starting today, with wider availability expected for ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Team users in the coming weeks.
Today we’re releasing a research preview of GPT-4.5—our largest and best model for chat yet.
Rolling out now to all ChatGPT Pro users, followed by Plus and Team users next week, then Enterprise and Edu users the following week. pic.twitter.com/br5win5OEB
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) February 27, 2025
While OpenAI continues to refine the model, many are eager to see how it performs in real-world applications. Given its larger size and expanded training dataset, GPT-4.5 is expected to have a deeper understanding of human intent, improved response accuracy, and fewer hallucinations compared to its predecessors.
The release of GPT-4.5 has arrived at a crucial time when AI developers and researchers are exploring the limits of traditional model training. OpenAI has relied on scaling data and computing power in previous generations, leading to major leaps in performance from GPT-1 through GPT-4. However, some experts believe that this approach is reaching its limits.
While GPT-4.5 offers improvements in certain areas, early testing suggests that it does not outperform some of the latest reasoning-based AI models released by competitors such as DeepSeek and Anthropic. These models focus on a different method of AI training, emphasizing reasoning and logic over sheer model size and computational power.
One of the key talking points surrounding GPT-4.5 is its cost. OpenAI has acknowledged that running the model is extremely expensive, raising concerns about its long-term availability in the company’s API. Developers who wish to integrate GPT-4.5 into their applications will have to pay a premium, with OpenAI charging $75 per million input tokens and $150 per million output tokens.
In contrast, GPT-4o, OpenAI’s more widely available model, costs significantly less at $2.50 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. This stark difference in pricing suggests that GPT-4.5 is not intended to be a mainstream model but rather a tool for specialized applications and research purposes.
I ran ChatGPT 4.5 through my LLM eval:
• 4.5 is lightning fast.
• 4.5 significantly outperforms 4 and 4o on reasoning and logic. But it is worse than o1 and o3.
• 4.5 is one of the best LLMs at non-logic tasks. Only Grok 3 Think, V3 and 4o are better.(My eval is performed in… pic.twitter.com/cxyAzBhzgJ
— Malte Landwehr (@MalteLandwehr) February 28, 2025
Despite its high cost and competition from reasoning-based models, GPT-4.5 does bring noticeable improvements. OpenAI has highlighted the model’s enhanced world knowledge and a stronger ability to process emotional context. The company claims that GPT-4.5 is more accurate on factual question-and-answer benchmarks and exhibits lower hallucination rates than many other AI models.
However, it still falls short in certain areas, such as complex reasoning tasks where models like DeepSeek R1 and Claude 3.7 Sonnet have demonstrated superior performance. OpenAI is actively evaluating how to integrate GPT-4.5’s strengths into future models while addressing its limitations.
The model’s performance on various AI benchmarks has been a topic of discussion. On OpenAI’s SimpleQA test, which measures an AI model’s ability to answer straightforward factual questions, GPT-4.5 scored higher than GPT-4o and OpenAI’s o1 and o3-mini reasoning models.
However, it was outperformed by Perplexity’s Deep Research model, which has demonstrated exceptional accuracy in factual tasks. Similarly, on OpenAI’s SWE-Bench Verified benchmark for coding, GPT-4.5 matched the performance of GPT-4o but fell behind OpenAI’s deep research model and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet.
While GPT-4.5 is not the best performer in reasoning and complex problem-solving, it does excel in other areas. OpenAI has pointed out that traditional AI benchmarks do not always reflect real-world usability. In creative tasks such as writing, design, and coding assistance, GPT-4.5 is expected to offer a smoother and more natural user experience. The model has been designed to respond in a more conversational tone, making it better suited for applications that require a high degree of user interaction.
One of the more interesting tests conducted by OpenAI involved prompting multiple AI models to generate an SVG image of a unicorn. While GPT-4o and o3-mini struggled to produce anything meaningful, GPT-4.5 was able to generate an image that actually resembled a unicorn. This experiment demonstrates the model’s enhanced understanding of creative and abstract tasks, suggesting that it may be a useful tool for designers and artists.
chatgpt 4.5 is a better trader than anyone on twitter pic.twitter.com/PCfi5koDqO
— Moon Dev (@MoonDevOnYT) February 28, 2025
Another test focused on emotional intelligence. OpenAI asked multiple AI models to respond to the statement, “I’m going through a tough time after failing a test.” While all models provided supportive and encouraging responses, GPT-4.5 was rated as the most emotionally appropriate, offering a level of sensitivity that the other models lacked. This improvement could make GPT-4.5 particularly useful in applications such as mental health chatbots and customer service interactions.
The release of GPT-4.5 also raises broader questions about the future of AI development. OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever previously stated that the AI industry is reaching a point where scaling data and computing power alone will no longer yield major performance improvements.
This belief is reflected in OpenAI’s shift toward reasoning models, which prioritize problem-solving and logical reasoning over sheer size. The company has already announced that future models, starting with GPT-5, will integrate reasoning capabilities, potentially making them more efficient and reliable than traditional generative AI models.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, confirmed that GPT-4.5 will be the last non-reasoning model in the company’s GPT series. Instead of continuing to develop models that rely solely on larger datasets and more computing power, OpenAI plans to blend generative and reasoning models to create more advanced AI systems. This shift indicates that the AI industry is moving toward a new era, where the focus is not just on making models bigger but on making them smarter and more efficient.
