OpenAI adds new features and updates to its flagship product, ChatGPT, on a fairly regular basis Usually these are small changes involving tweaks to how the model reacts, but last week the company rolled out an entirely new version of GPT-4o

I reported last week that ChatGPT had made a “secret update” to the GPT Now it appears that there has been a change

Through X's ChatGPT app account, OpenAI declared: “Starting last week, ChatGPT has a new GPT-4o model

In typical OpenAI fashion, the details shared about the new model are as scarce as the announcement All we know is that it is not “gpt-4o-2024-08-06” The new API model released last week is designed to give developers cheap access to the power of GPT-4o If you don't want to use ChatGPT, we have tried several good alternatives

OpenAI has said nothing officially beyond X's post, which has been wildly speculated on social media Some believe this is an upgrade to GPT-4o Large, which is speculated to be a larger version of GPT-4o with more parameters than GPT-4o or GPT-4o mini

I am not convinced by that theory, because if it were an entirely new model, it would have been announced like the GPT-4o mini was However, there is some logic to the idea that OpenAI will follow other AI labs like Anthropic and Google in releasing different sized models

OpenAI also tends to test new models in the area of LMSys chatbots, where humans blindly evaluate two models In this arena, an anonymous chatbot that many suspect is an update of GPT-4o is gaining popularity

Whether it is a tweaked version of GPT-4o, a new larger model, or the first sighting of Project Strawberry, what we have is a better ChatGPT that refuses to respond less often

According to OpenAI, the new model simply replaces the current version of GPT-4o within ChatGPT, so access is as simple as visiting the ChatGPT website or opening the app to chat

It is unclear if the update will also apply to GPT-4o mini, but OpenAI notes that it is for free users with message limitations on X, so it is assumed that this is only the full version of GPT-4o

Pushing the model to its limits requires a $20/month subscription to ChatGPT Plus, but you can get enough messages per day to try it for free If you run out of messages and don't want to upgrade, you can switch to GPT-4o mini, a tweaked, smaller version of GPT-4o