WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF
Increasingly AI is being trained on “Human skills” like behaviours, relationships, and EQ which means it’s now even nicer to you.
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In what has already been a busy past few days for new model releases, OpenAI is capping off the week with a research preview of GPT 4.5. The company is touting the new system as its largest and best model for chat yet. In early testing, OpenAI says people found GPT 4.5 to be a more natural conversationalist, with the ability to convey warmth and display a kind of emotional intelligence.
In one example shared by OpenAI, a person tells ChatGPT they’re going through a hard time after failing a test. Where the company’s previous models, including GPT-4o and o3-mini, might commiserate with the individual before offering a long list of unsolicited advice, GPT-4.5 takes a different tact.
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“Want to talk about what happened, or do you just need a distraction? I’m here either way,” the chatbot says when powered by GPT 4.5.
The gains shown by GPT 4.5 are the result of advancements OpenAI made in unsupervised learning. With unsupervised learning, a machine learning algorithm is given an unlabelled data set and left to its own devices to find patterns and insights. GPT-4.5 doesn’t “think” like the company’s state-of-the-art reasoning models, but in training the new model OpenAI made architectural enhancements and gave it access to more data and compute power.
“The result is a model that has broader knowledge and a deeper understanding of the world, leading to reduced hallucinations,” the company says.
Speaking of reduced hallucinations, OpenAI measured how much better GPT 4.5 in that regard. When put through SimpleQA, an OpenAI designed benchmark that tests large language models on their ability to answer “straightforward but challenging knowledge questions,” GPT-4.5 beat out o3-mini, GPT-4o and even o1 with a hallucination rate of 37.1 percent. Obviously, the new model doesn’t solve the problem of AI hallucinations altogether, but it is a step in the right direction.
Despite its relative strengths over GPT-4o and o3-mini, GPT 4.5 isn’t a direct replacement for those models. Compared to OpenAI’s reasoning systems, GPT 4.5 is “a more general-purpose, innately smarter model.” Additionally, it’s not natively multimodal like GPT-4o, meaning it doesn’t work with features like Voice Mode, video or screensharing. It’s also “a very large and compute-intensive model.”
It’s best to think of GPT 4.5 as a stepping stone to systems OpenAI plans to offer in the future. In fact, Sam Altman said as much earlier this month when he shared the company’s roadmap, noting GPT 4.5 would be “our last non-chain-of-thought model” – referring to the fact that the new system doesn’t solve problems by tackling them step by step like OpenAI’s reasoning models do. Its successor, GPT-5, will likely integrate many of OpenAI’s latest technologies, including its frontier o3 model. OpenAI reiterated that today, saying it plans to bring GPT-4.5’s “unique strengths, including broader knowledge, stronger intuition, and greater ‘EQ,’ to all users in future models.”
In the meantime, ChatGPT Pro subscribers can begin using GPT-4.5 starting today, with Pro and Team users slated to gain access starting next week.
