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Up to date Friday August 8, 5:21 pm ET: Following this publish’s publication, OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman introduced the corporate would restore entry to GPT-4o and different previous fashions for chosen customers, admitting the GPT-5 launch was “extra bumpy than we hoped for.”
After asserting the discharge of its latest flagship mannequin household, GPT-5, OpenAI mentioned the mannequin will energy all of ChatGPT, and that it’s going to sundown the prevailing fashions within the chat platform.
OpenAI, by means of a spokesperson, informed VentureBeat that GPT-5 “will substitute all different fashions in ChatGPT, so customers don’t have to select relying on every job, which takes impact after getting entry to GPT-5.” This implies folks can not select GPT-4o, o3, o4-mini or o4-mini-high.
With GPT-5 entry rolling out to ChatGPT Plus, Free, Professional and Crew customers beginning, solely the Enterprise and Edu tiers can nonetheless use the “legacy” fashions for 60 days.
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The information got here as a shock to many ChatGPT customers, who had come to depend on their chosen fashions to run their on a regular basis queries. Some folks mentioned the adjustment would take a while getting used to, primarily as a result of they’d based mostly workflows on how the mannequin interacted with them or typical response occasions.
Different customers claimed they developed “a connection” to their chosen mannequin and located a demo within the livestream announcement asking GPT-4o to put in writing its personal eulogy distasteful. The lack of GPT-4o garnered essentially the most misery. In spite of everything, 4o was the default mannequin for ChatGPT, and a few customers both most popular it or by no means bothered to change fashions as a result of it labored for his or her wants.
I used 4o because the default and located it annoying at first when my customized GPT started defaulting to a reasoning mannequin. I’ve since come round to the reasoning mannequin for work-related queries, however I nonetheless usually flip to 4o for faster questions, reminiscent of planning a visit or producing reward concepts.
ChatGPT had come beneath hearth earlier than with the variety of mannequin selections it provided, prompting OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to confess in February that its mannequin picker (the place folks can select from a dropdown which mannequin they like) grew to become difficult. Altman vowed to unify the expertise, which now looks as if a touch to what they finally determined to do with GPT-5 on ChatGPT.
Final month, rumors circulated that OpenAI would introduce an automated mannequin router that chooses a mannequin for customers based mostly on their workload.
OpenAI has sunsetted fashions earlier than, however that is the primary time all current fashions on the chat platform can be eliminated and changed wholesale.
Catapult into the long run
Alternatively, lots of people see the sunsetting of GPT-4o and the o3 and o4 household of fashions as OpenAI “catapulting” 400 million customers into the long run.
Some web feedback declare that individuals who complain about AI fashions not being sensible are a direct consequence of their by no means switching fashions within the first place. Eradicating legacy fashions as choices will drive extra customers to make use of the most recent and most succesful fashions.
Enterprise APIs are protected
For enterprises, the affect of dropping fashions like GPT-4o on ChatGPT can be felt extra on the person or group degree. In fact, for now, subscribers on the ChatGPT Enterprise tier can nonetheless entry all the fashions.
However enterprises that constructed their purposes or brokers on both GPT-4o or one of many reasoning fashions can relaxation simple. OpenAI informed VentureBeat that the corporate has no plans to deprecate fashions on the API aspect.
“Within the API, we don’t at present plan to deprecate older fashions,” the OpenAI spokesperson mentioned. “We are going to share superior discover with builders if we determine to sundown fashions sooner or later.”
Many enterprises commonly consider fashions, to the purpose of even switching from an LLM or a smaller mannequin to save lots of on prices. OpenAI creates dividing line: Sundown of legacy fashions GPT 4o and o3 causes chaos for ChatGPT customers, however enterprise APIs are protected — for now
