OpenAI GPT-4.5 – The Most Powerful AI Yet

OpenAI has officially launched GPT-4.5, codenamed Orion, marking the company’s largest AI model to date. Despite its size and the massive computational resources invested in its development, OpenAI does not classify GPT-4.5 as a "frontier model." Instead, it sees the release as an opportunity to explore the model’s strengths and limitations through a research preview.

Exclusive Rollout to Premium Users

Subscribers to ChatGPT Pro—OpenAI’s $200-a-month plan—will gain immediate access to GPT-4.5. Paid API users can also start experimenting with it today. ChatGPT Plus and Team users will have to wait until next week for access, as confirmed by an OpenAI spokesperson.

The anticipation around GPT-4.5 has been immense. Many in the industry view it as a critical test for traditional AI scaling techniques, as OpenAI continues to push the limits of its pre-training methodology—scaling up data and compute power in an unsupervised learning process.

Performance Gains—But at a Cost

Historically, increasing model size has led to major leaps in AI performance, particularly in domains like mathematics, writing, and coding. OpenAI claims that GPT-4.5 boasts a “deeper world knowledge” and “higher emotional intelligence” than its predecessors. However, the gains are beginning to plateau.

• On OpenAI’s SimpleQA benchmark, GPT-4.5 outperforms GPT-4o and OpenAI’s own reasoning models in terms of accuracy and factual consistency.
• The model is also less prone to hallucinations, meaning it makes up information less frequently.
• In coding, GPT-4.5 matches GPT-4o on the SWE-Bench Verified test but falls short of OpenAI’s deep research model and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet.
• GPT-4.5 performs well on OpenAI’s SWE-Lancer benchmark, which evaluates software development tasks, but it still lags behind leading AI reasoning models in problem-solving and deep analytical tasks.

Despite these improvements, GPT-4.5 is extremely expensive to operate. OpenAI is already questioning whether it will continue offering the model in its API over the long term due to its high computational costs.

Not a Direct Replacement for GPT-4o

OpenAI stresses that GPT-4.5 is not a substitute for GPT-4o, the company’s primary model powering ChatGPT and the API. While GPT-4.5 supports features like file and image uploads and ChatGPT’s canvas tool, it lacks support for ChatGPT’s realistic two-way voice mode—a major limitation.

However, the model does excel in areas that aren’t easily measured by traditional benchmarks:

• Creative Tasks: GPT-4.5 produces more natural and emotionally intelligent responses, making it better suited for writing and design-related tasks.
• Human-like Understanding: OpenAI’s informal tests showed GPT-4.5 responding more empathetically in scenarios requiring emotional intelligence.

One particularly interesting test involved asking different AI models to generate a unicorn in SVG format (a vector-based graphics format). While GPT-4.5 successfully produced a unicorn-like image, GPT-4o and o3-mini failed to generate anything recognizable.

The Scaling Law Challenge: The End of Traditional AI Training?

The release of GPT-4.5 also raises serious questions about the future of AI scaling. OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever previously warned that the industry may have reached the limits of traditional pre-training techniques.

The lack of dramatic performance gains in GPT-4.5 supports this theory. AI research is now shifting toward reasoning models, which prioritize deep thinking over sheer scale. These models take longer to process tasks but produce more consistent and accurate results.

The Road to GPT-5: A Hybrid Future

Looking ahead, OpenAI plans to merge its GPT models with its O-series reasoning models, starting with GPT-5 later this year. GPT-4.5, while a powerful model, is likely just a transitional step toward a more advanced hybrid AI system that blends traditional pre-training with new reasoning-based techniques.

While GPT-4.5 may not dominate AI benchmarks, its launch signals an important moment for OpenAI and the broader AI industry: the era of simply scaling up data and compute power may be coming to an end. The next breakthroughs will likely come from rethinking AI’s fundamental architecture, rather than just making it bigger.