OpenAI, a US-based artificial intelligence firm has announced the release of GPT-4o mini, a new generative AI model designed to be more affordable than its predecessors.
According to the company’s blog post, this new model is “an order of magnitude more affordable than previous frontier models” and “more than 60% cheaper than GPT-3.5 Turbo.”
GPT-4o mini is intended as a budget-friendly alternative to OpenAI’s current top consumer model for ChatGPT. Despite its lower price, the company claims that the difference in power and performance is minimal.
OpenAI says that “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 new model currently offers text and vision functionalities, with plans to add audio and video capabilities in future updates. However, OpenAI has not revealed how they have reduced the running costs, leaving questions about potential environmental benefits unanswered.
This launch comes amid ongoing developments at OpenAI, including reports of work on an advanced reasoning model called “Strawberry” and potential investigations into the company’s use of non-disclosure agreements (NDA) by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
