In the OpenAI-verse, stirrings of something called ‘Orion’ began surfacing late last year. On February 27th, 2025, OpenAI officially announced GPT-4.5 — their “strongest GPT model” yet, available now as a research preview for Pro subscribers and devs worldwide.
Here’s what we know so far about GPT-4.5, what people are saying about it and how it could impact marketers using ChatGPT.
What’s Different About GPT-4.5 Compared to Previous Models?
With every iteration of artificial intelligence, one can assume that a new model is more capable, powerful and makes fewer mistakes than its previous versions. That assumption is par for the course here with OpenAI’s GPT-4.5, but there’s a bit more to it.
OpenAI says that GPT-4.5:
- Has a broader knowledge base that enables deeper world knowledge for greater accuracy and factuality.
- Provides a more natural chat experience than previous models.
- Hallucinates less compared to GPT-4o, OpenAI o1 and OpenAI o3-mini.
It’s important to note that, unlike GPT-4o, GPT-4.5 is not a “reasoning model” and may not excel in benchmarks focused on logical reasoning. Instead, it offers a different kind of intelligence, aiming to provide an experience that feels akin to conversing with a thoughtful person.
So far, according to OpenAI’s human testers of the updated model, GPT-4.5 is delivering on these claims. In their update, the company shared data from human testers that shows a majority preferred GPT-4.5 responses over GPT-4o for three types of common queries: everyday, professional and creative.
There’s also something to say about the safety of the updated model. OpenAI says that GPT-4.5 was trained using “new techniques for supervision that are combined with traditional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) methods like those used for GPT‑4o.”
Specific areas of risk OpenAI is stress testing for include disallowed content, jailbreaks and model mistakes, with the hope that this work creates a solid safety foundation for future, more capable models.
This all sounds well and good, but how accessible is this new model compared to GPT-4o?
The Cost of GPT-4.5
OpenAI admits that GPT-4.5 is expensive to run. As such, they’ve said that this model isn’t a steadfast stand-in for GPT-4o — at least not yet. For comparison’s sake, GPT-4.5 costs developers $75 per million input tokens and $150 per million output tokens; GPT-4o costs $2.50 and $10 per million, respectively. That said, cost alone makes GPT-4.5 less accessible to small developers who access the model through OpenAI’s API and have to pay these prices to use it. Pro subscribers ($200/month) can access GPT-4.5 at no additional cost.
How Are Users Receiving GPT-4.5 in Its Early Stages?
You can always count on me to turn to Reddit for slightly more authentic opinions than biased or sponsored articles. In r/OpenAI, users who’ve experimented with GPT-4.5 have had some fruitful discussions. Here’s what a few folks are saying based on their interactions with the model so far:
“GPT-4.5 is good at talking like a human and picking up emotions.” – u/Christosconst
“Honestly, when comparing answers on lmsys, it’s clear that GPT4.5 is just better than any other LLM. Feels much more mature in every way.” – u/JoMaster68
“4.5 is definitely a new kind of experience to talk to. It doesn’t feel like AI slop.” – u/coylter
There are plenty of neutral to negative sentiments, too, on other threads and subreddits:
“Honestly it’s way too overpriced for what it offers. There are some improvements to natural conversation flow and depth, but they’re not game-changing enough to justify the cost.” – u/LightDense1224
“I absolutely hate it. It honestly doesn’t feel like it’s helping you with how often it sneakily feigns incompetence and does a false refusal based on some misunderstanding of IP or thinking some science fiction is a ploy to get it to make evil plans.” – u/yawaworht-a-sti-sey
To everyone’s credit, it’s still early in GPT-4.5’s lifecycle. Having only launched a week ago, the model and OpenAI still have plenty of time to benefit from users’ experimentation and expression of opinions, which will help them dial in on their end-goal hopes for GPT-4.5.
How Will GPT-4.5 Affect Marketers?
Given the high cost of GPT-4.5, I’m skeptical that marketers — ones from smaller businesses, anyway — will use the model much at this stage. That said, those who do choose to take advantage of the model in its early stages — mostly Pro subscribers, probably — could stand to experience a few improvements over other versions:
More Human-Like Content Creation
GPT-4.5’s enhanced natural language generation makes AI-written content sound even more authentic and engaging. Marketers can leverage it for blog posts, ad copy, email sequences and social media captions that feel less robotic and more personalized.
This is not an advocacy to do away with human-led, human-oversight, human-edited content. That will always be important no matter how good the tech gets. However, those who’ve come to lean on ChatGPT for tasks like this may experience a leveling-up with GPT-4.5 should they choose to use it.
Better Personalization and Customer Engagement
Since GPT-4.5 is designed to understand user intent better, its AI-generated responses and messaging feel a bit more tailored. This could improve chatbots, automated email marketing and customer support interactions, making them feel more human-like.
Ethical Considerations and Brand Voice
GPT-4.5’s reduced hallucination rate means fewer instances of misinformation or brand-damaging mistakes. However, marketers will still need to check, double-check, fact-check and — ideally — edit outputs to ensure AI aligns with their brand’s values and messaging.
Final Thoughts
It’s still early, and given GPT-4.5’s research preview roll out that’s somewhat inaccessible to most people, it’s difficult to know how much better, worse or similar it is to other OpenAI models and market competitors. Right now, we really only have what OpenAI itself has said about 4.5’s capabilities in its announcement. To their credit, they’re being transparent about GPT-4.5 in its preview state, writing:
“We’re sharing GPT‑4.5 as a research preview to better understand its strengths and limitations. We’re still exploring what it’s capable of and are eager to see how people use it in ways we might not have expected.”
Given that it’s just a preview at this stage, there’s not a scramble to get acquainted with GPT-4.5. The bottom line, from my POV, is: Experiment with it if you’re keen and curious, but don’t sweat it if you can’t stomach the pricing.
In a post on X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that the forthcoming GPT-5 will be available to all users — including free users — at its baseline intelligence setting. So, that’s when there will be more to explore in the OpenAI-verse.
