OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 Underwhelms; Is Poolside Worth $5 Billion?

Poolside co-founder Jason Warner. Photo via Getty.

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I enjoyed meeting many of you at AI Agenda Live in San Francisco last week! Thank you for coming. Next up is our April 28 event in New York on how the AI boom is being financed.

Right on cue, my colleagues just published articles about the tens of billions of dollars that SoftBank and CoreWeave are hoping to borrow to develop artificial intelligence data centers.

Let’s get to the news…

OpenAI must have been feeling the pressure from Anthropic and xAI’s recent model releases because on Thursday it launched GPT-4.5 (Orion), its latest large language model. But OpenAI went out of its way to lower expectations for the model.

On X, CEO Sam Altman described GPT-4.5 as a “giant, expensive model” that “won’t crush benchmarks.” By OpenAI’s own admission, the new model generally performs worse than a number of other models, such as Anthropic’s just-launched Claude 3.7 Sonnet and even some of OpenAI’s own reasoning models that have been available for months. It’s also incredibly expensive, costing more than 10 times more than 3.7 Sonnet.