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GPT-4.5 Wants to Be Your Friend

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Hello, and happy Sunday! This week Dan Shipper and Alex Duffy got an early look at OpenAI’s newest model, ChatGPT-4.5. Their assessment: It’s friendlier, slower, pricier, and surprisingly human. Read on for our complete review, as well as everything else we published.—Kate Lee

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Release notes 

GPT-4.5 arrives

This week, OpenAI dropped GPT-4.5 as a research preview for ChatGPT Pro users, and our first impressions are…mixed. We published our complete thoughts several hours after it went live.

No, it's not the jaw-dropping leap in intelligence we’d hoped for, especially given a reported order-of-magnitude increase in the cost of training the model compared to previous versions. Some benchmarks improved and hallucinations decreased slightly, but it's no slam dunk. Instead, OpenAI leaned heavily into emotional intelligence, creativity, and conversational warmth. 

If GPT-4o feels like an efficient assistant, GPT-4.5 is trying to be your empathetic, opinionated bestie.

The good: It writes better. Responses have rhythm and clarity, and feel surprisingly human—OpenAI calls it "Orion prose," optimized for spoken conversation. This could be huge for voice-based AI interactions, especially if you consider Sesame’s latest voice AI demo (seriously, check this out—Evan Armstrong called it like having “a glitchy phone call with a really flirty person”). 

Emotionally, 4.5 is a noticeable step up, capable of genuinely funny, comforting, and insightful interactions. Sam Altman tweeted that talking with GPT-4.5 feels "like talking to a thoughtful person," and frankly, he’s not wrong.

GPT-4.5 even “yo mama”’d me:

Source: ChatGPT-4.5. Courtesy of Alex Duffy.

The bad: It’s SLOW. Painfully slow. And restricted to the $200 a month ChatGPT Pro tier. Altman admitted on X that they're facing a severe GPU shortage due to surging growth. The company will  soon roll out tens of thousands of additional GPUs, but for now, using GPT-4.5 can test your patience.

And speaking of GPU shortages, get ready for sticker shock. The GPT-4.5 API cost is approximately 15-20 times more than GPT-4o and significantly more than competitors—many of which outscore GPT-4.5 in multiple benchmarks. 

Source: Claude. Courtesy of Alex Duffy.

One more caveat: GPT-4.5 struggles with instructions. It's opinionated, so it also deviates from directly answering your prompts in an attempt to come up with creative responses. This might initially frustrate, but given time, we found ourselves warming to its quirks. 

This mixed bag has led to some disappointment from the tech community, many of whom have been eagerly awaiting a next-generation model since GPT-4's release almost two years ago. Despite these bumps, GPT-4.5 is fascinating precisely because it's a different kind of intelligence. It won't dominate the benchmarks, but it may become your favorite conversational companion—especially once paired with advanced voice interfaces. 

Why OpenAI chose to move in this direction starts to make sense when you zoom out a little: Big model providers are starting to pick their lanes. Anthropic and Claude are hyper-optimizing for code to woo engineers, while OpenAI is hoping GPT can become the go-to AI assistant for everyone. 

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