OpenAI Debuts Cheaper AI Model GPT-4o Mini

OpenAI has introduced a smaller, more affordable iteration of its artificial intelligence (AI) model ChatGPT.

GPT-4o mini, announced Thursday (July 18), is available now for free users and paying ChatGPT Plus and Team subscribers, with enterprise customers getting access next week. It replaces the previous model GPT-3.5 Turbo.

“GPT-4o mini surpasses GPT-3.5 Turbo and other small models on academic benchmarks across both textual intelligence and multimodal reasoning, and supports the same range of languages as GPT-4o,” the company said. “It also demonstrates strong performance in function calling, which can enable developers to build applications that fetch data or take actions with external systems, and improved long-context performance compared to GPT-3.5 Turbo.”

OpenAI introduced GPT-4o — with “o” meaning “omni” — in May, part of an ongoing race among tech giants and startups to deploy advanced AI systems for various applications.

“In our mission to enable the bleeding edge, to build the most powerful, useful applications, we of course want to continue doing the frontier models, pushing the envelope here,” Olivier Godement, the head of product for OpenAI’s API, told Bloomberg News Thursday. “But we also want to have the best small models out there.”

He added that some developers have already been trying GPT-4o mini. For example, email startup Superhuman used it to create automated replies to messages, while the model helped financial services startup Ramp pull information from receipts.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote earlier this week about OpenAI’s efforts to create human-level AI, otherwise known as artificial general intelligence (AGI). Such a development, that report said, has “set the business world abuzz with visions of AI-powered commerce that could rewrite global trade rules — if the tech lives up to the hype.”

A recent report by Reuters said that the company is taking a new approach to its AI models under the project code-named “Strawberry,” which hopes to enhance the models’ advanced reasoning capabilities.

Although the exact details and timeline are unclear, the project focuses on bolstering the AI’s ability to understand and process complex information, setting up the Microsoft-backed startup to expand the boundaries of what its models can achieve.

“OpenAI’s pursuit of human-level reasoning isn’t just a technological marvel; it’s a narrative of pushing boundaries and sparking new possibilities in every sector,” Ghazenfer Mansoor, founder and CEO of Technology Rivers, told PYMNTS. “In business, AI can dramatically change how supply chains are managed, forecast market trends with great accuracy, and make customer experiences very personal on a big scale.”