# On GPT-4.5

It’s happening.

The question is, what is the it that is happening? An impressive progression of intelligence? An expensive, slow disappointment? Something else?

The evals we have available don’t help us that much here, even more than usual.

My tentative conclusion is it’s Secret Third Thing.

It’s a different form factor, with unique advantages, that is hard to describe precisely in words. It appears so far that GPT-4.5 has advantages in places like verbal intelligence, contextual adaptation, detailed knowledge, and a kind of abstract writing skill. It has better taste and aesthetics.

It is the first model I asked to help edit its own review, and it was (slightly) helpful.

It’s a different way to use a lot of compute to get more intelligence. When you need a reasoning model, or you need code written, do not call on GPT-4.5.

You need to carve out a new ‘place in your rotation’ for it.

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## Introducing GPT-4.5

Altman tells us up front: It’s a different kind of intelligence.

> : GPT-4.5 is ready!
> 
> Good news: It is the first model that feels like talking to a thoughtful person to me. I have had several moments where I’ve sat back in my chair and been astonished at getting actually good advice from an AI.
> 
> Bad news: It is a giant, expensive model. We really wanted to launch it to Plus and Pro subscribers at the same time, but we’ve been growing rapidly and are out of GPUs. We will add tens of thousands of GPUs next week and roll it out to the Plus tier then. (Hundreds of thousands are coming soon, and I’m pretty sure you all will use every one we can accumulate.)
> 
> This isn’t how we want to operate, but it’s hard to perfectly predict growth surges that lead to GPU shortages.
> 
> A heads-up: This isn’t a reasoning model and won’t crush benchmarks. It’s a different kind of intelligence, and there’s a magic to it I haven’t felt before. I’m really excited for people to try it!

I have seen enough that I do feel it would be a tragedy if OpenAI pulled GPT-4.5 without replacing it with another model that did similar things. But yes, fandom has long taught us that if you offer something cool and then threaten to take it away, there will be those stepping up to try and stop you.

## Our Price Not Cheap

This is a big model. It is priced accordingly. Indeed, it is so expensive to serve OpenAI mentions that it is not certain it will continue serving it via API at all. The obvious response is ‘then charge more’ but presumably they feel that means taking fire.

>  update: selling my children to try out 4.5 today
> 
> Chris Malloy: Ouch.
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> 

I mean sure that’s relatively a lot but also it’s eleven bucks. So it depends on the user. Seriously, please, let us pay for the good stuff. If I don’t want it, I won’t pay. Fine.

> : I’m more positive on 4.5 than almost anyone else I have read. I view it as a model that attempts to improve on the dimension of aesthetics only. As we know from Kant’s third Critique, that is about the hardest achievement possible. I think once combined with “reasoning” it will be amazing. Think of this as just one input in a nearly fixed proportions production function.

I mostly don’t think this is cope. I think this is someone with a very different view of the production function than yours. The same things driving him to think travel to Manhattan is more important than living in Manhattan is making him highly value a model with better aesthetics.

Where I definitely disagree with him is in the idea that the model is only attempting to improve on the aesthetic dimension. I have no doubt OpenAI had much higher hopes for what GPT-4.5 would bring us, and were absolutely attempting to improve along all dimensions at once. That doesn’t take away the value of the aesthetics.

> : Laughed more from GPT 4.5 this week than from any human, it is also funny on the AI skeptics.
> 
> : It’s the weirdest model release since a while. Cost/benchmark performance is ridiculous but at the same time it’s probably the most addictive and also funniest model I ever tried.

The ones who are high on 4.5 are mostly very confident they are right.

> : My guess: GPT 4.5 is basically what happened to Opus 3.5. Very large, marginal improvements, but will be useful internally.
> 
> Anthropic decided to keep internal, use to build other models. OpenAI released with an incredibly high price, feeling the competition from other labs.

## Predictions

> : And now I lengthen my timelines, at least if my preliminary assessment of GPT-4.5 holds up.
> 
> Not that much better than 4o (especially at coding, and worse than Sonnet or R1). While I feel more confident in some cases, the benchmarks are clearly disappointing, in ways that should inform our expectations.

## The Lighter Side

I will not be explaining.

> : For the confused, it’s actually super easy:
> 
> - GPT 4.5 is the new Claude 3.6 (aka 3.5)
> - Claude 3.7 is the new o3-mini-high
> - Claude Code is the new Cursor
> - Grok is the new Perplexity
> - o1 pro is the ‘smartest’, except for o3, which backs Deep Research
> 
> Obviously. Keep up.

## References

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