(Reuters) – ChatGPT developer OpenAI said on Thursday it is launching a small, cost-efficient AI model called the GPT-4o mini, aiming to make its technology more affordable, less energy-intensive and target a wider range of customers.
OpenAI, a market leader in AI software and backed by Microsoft, has been working to make it cheaper and faster for developers to build applications based on its models at a time when better-funded rivals such as Meta and Google are rushing to gain market share.
OpenAI says GPT-4o mini is priced at 15 cents per million input tokens and 60 cents per million output tokens, more than 60% cheaper than GPT-3.5 Turbo.
OpenAI says the model currently outperforms the GPT-4 model on chat preferences, scoring 82% in large-scale multi-task language understanding (MMLU).
MMLU is a text intelligence and inference benchmark used to evaluate the capabilities of language models. A higher MMLU score means better understanding and use of language in different domains, improving real-world usage.
According to OpenAI, the GPT-4o mini model’s score compared to 77.9% from Google’s Gemini Flash and 73.8% from Anthropic’s Claude Haiku.
Smaller language models require less computing power to run, making them a more affordable option for resource-limited businesses looking to introduce generative AI into their operations.
OpenAI says the minimodel currently supports text and vision in its application programming interface, and that in the future it will also support text, image, video and audio input and output.
OpenAI said ChatGPT’s free, Plus and Team users will get access to GPT-4o mini, which replaces GPT-3.5 Turbo and has knowledge up to October 2023, starting on Thursday, while enterprise users will get access starting next week.
(Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Vijay Kishore)