The AI field was dull and quiet, and the buzz it created mostly happened within its own field, and rarely reach far beyond its own audience.
But when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT as a AI chatbot tool, the internet was quickly captivated. This is because the AI is able to do a wide range of tasks, including writing poetry, technical papers, novels, and essays.
Later, further research and development saw huge bumps of intelligence, and that generative AI tools can be much more than just chatbots.
With other tech companies, large and small, realize this potential, and began to see the lucrativeness of this business, they began an arms race towards building the most powerful AI tool.
But those tools don't come cheap.
And this is where OpenAI introduces a mini version of its powerful multimodal large language model it calls the 'GPT-4o mini'.
way back in 2022, the best model in the world was text-davinci-003.
it was much, much worse than this new model.
it cost 100x more.— Sam Altman (@sama) July 18, 2024
The U.S.-based AI firm OpenAI announced the launch of GPT-4o mini, which it describes in a website post, is "an order of magnitude more affordable than previous frontier models" and “more than 60% cheaper than GPT-3.5 Turbo."
So here, GPT-4o mini is essentially the cost-effective version of the powerful GPT-4o, but being cheaper doesn't mean the tradeoff between power and performance is huge.
Despite being more cost-effective and operates with a much smaller energy consumption footprint, GPT-4o mini doesn’t appear to be lacking.
"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."
What's more, the model also supports much of the same functionality as its predecessor. It's initial version however, is only limited to just text and vision.
OpenAI said that it plans to add audio and video support soon.
We’re continuing to make advanced AI accessible to all with the launch of GPT-4o mini, now available in the API and rolling out in ChatGPT today. https://t.co/sTxtOfUapJ
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) July 18, 2024
GPT-4o Mini is meant to provide a cheaper model for developers who wish to build their own apps using OpenAI's AI, but without racking up a huge bill.
Developers without the means to afford to tinker with it can get priced out of it entirely and may opt for cheaper models, and rivals have been providing them for quite a while.
Google, for example, has what it calls the Gemini 1.5 Flash, and Anthropic has the Claude 3 Haiku.
With GPT-4o Mini, OpenAI is entering the light model game.
"I think GPT-4o Mini really gets at the OpenAI mission of making AI more broadly accessible to people. If we want AI to benefit every corner of the world, every industry, every application, we have to make AI much more affordable," said Olivier Godement, who leads the API platform product.
OpenAI, thanks to popularizing the generative AI trend, has become one of the fastest-growing companies ever.
In just a few years time, the company is now worth shy of $100 billion by investors.
But with pretty much all big tech companies are becoming rivals in this field, OpenAI is under pressure to stay on top of the generative AI market and because of that, it needs to find ways to make money as it spends massive sums on processors and infrastructure to build and train its models.
GPT-4o Mini is part of OpenAI's push to be at the forefront of "multimodality," or the ability to offer a wide range of types of AI-generated media, like text, images, audio and video, inside one tool: ChatGPT.
"The world is multimodal. If you think about the way we as humans process the world and engage with the world, we see things, we hear things, we say things – the world is much bigger than text. So to us, it always felt incomplete for text and code to be the single modalities, the single interfaces that we could have to how powerful these models are and what they can do," once said OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap.