New Language Model Gives ChatGPT A Boost

Those who are familiar with ChatGPT knows that one of its great strengthsis its ability to aid in creative writing. ChatGPT’s latest large language model, GPT-4o, has received a bit of a performance boost, OpenAI announced last 20 November.

Users, like students, reporters and technical writers, can reportedly expect "more natural, engaging, and tailored writing to improve relevance and readability" moving forward.

GPT-4o, not to be confused with 01 (formerly Project Strawberry), is OpenAI’s latest publicly available model, surpassing GPT-4 and GPT-3.5. It was was first released in May 2024 and offers users double the performance at half the resource cost of its direct predecessor, GPT-4-Turbo, as well as state-of-the-art benchmark results in voice, multilingual, and vision tasks.

GPT-4o not only is more efficient than older versions but it offers a host of additional capabilities. The model’s rapid response pace makes it especially useful for real-time translation and conversation applications.

For example, ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode would not be possible without the near-instantaneous text, voice, and audio inference that GPT-4o offers (and that previous models did not). GPT-4o boasts improved reasoning skills over its predecessors as well, able to interpret a user’s spoken tone and intention, understand unique aspects of their tone, pace, and mood, and reply in kind.

While GPT-4o is technically available to every OpenAI subscriber level, including the free tier, it is not available for unlimited use. Free-tier users will find that they can only access the new model a handful of times on ChatGPT before being shunted down to interact with the smaller GPT-4o-mini model. Plus, Teams, and Enterprise subscribers have a rate limit roughly five times higher.

GPT-4o-mini is based on the same training data as its larger sibling, but leverages fewer variables (not to mention fewer compute resources) in its inference operations. Being lighter-weight and more responsive, GPT-40-mini has proven useful in a variety of small-scale applications including computer code generation.