OpenAI slashes prices for GPT-4 1, igniting AI price war among tech giants

Morgan Stanley is creating a GPT-4-powered system that’ll retrieve info from company documents and serve it up to financial analysts. It’s difficult to test AI chatbots from version to version, but in our own experiments  with ChatGPT and GPT-4 Turbo we found it does now know about more recent events – like the iPhone 15 launch. As ChatGPT has never held or used an iPhone though, it’s nowhere near being able to offer the information you’d get from our iPhone 15 review. Some in the community speculated that high compute costs might have influenced the move, noting that similar changes had occurred with prior models.

OpenAI is also readying the full version of its o3 reasoning model and an o4 mini version that could debut even sooner. AI engineer Tibor Blaho discovered references to o4 mini, o4 mini high, and o3 in a new ChatGPT web version earlier today, suggesting these additions are imminent. I understand o3 and o4 mini are both set to debut next week, unless OpenAI moves the launch plans around. GPT-4 can generate text (including code) and accept image and text inputs — an improvement over GPT-3.5, its predecessor, which only accepted text — and performs at “human level” on various professional and academic benchmarks.

Deprecation had been planned since April

OpenAI is reportedly nearing the announcement of its $3 billion acquisition of Windsurf, one of the most popular AI coding tools on the market. Earlier on Wednesday, Google updated its Gemini chatbot to connect more easily to GitHub projects. The steady march of AI innovation means that OpenAI hasn’t stopped with GPT-4.

OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 AI model comes to more ChatGPT users

• Two new AI models join 7 others, leaving some paid users wondering which one is best.
• November 30, 2022 – OpenAI introduced ChatGPT using GPT-3.5 as a part of a free research preview.
• Demonstrating high confidence in GPT-4.1’s practical advantages, Windsurf—the AI-powered IDE—has offered an unprecedented free, unlimited GPT-4.1 trial for a week.

Llama 4 Maverick isn’t exactly the top of the line model from Meta either, which will be Llama 4 Behemoth, due to be released at a later date, competing with GPT-4.5 and Claude Sonnet 3.7. If you’re a developer using the models through the API, the consideration is more of a trade-off between capability, speed, and cost. But in ChatGPT, your choice might be limited more by personal taste in behavioral style and what you’d like to accomplish. Some of the “more capable” models have lower usage limits as well because they cost more for OpenAI to run. A weekly newsletter by David Pierce designed to tell you everything you need to download, watch, read, listen to, and explore that fits in The Verge’s universe.

Benchmarks:

On several AI benchmarks, GPT-4.5 falls short of newer AI “reasoning” models from Chinese AI company DeepSeek, Anthropic, and OpenAI itself. Demonstrating high confidence in GPT-4.1’s practical advantages, Windsurf—the AI-powered IDE—has offered an unprecedented free, unlimited GPT-4.1 trial for a week. This isn’t mere generosity; it’s a strategic gamble that once developers experience GPT-4.1’s capabilities and cost savings firsthand, reverting to pricier or less capable models will be a tough sell. OpenAI released GPT-4.1 this morning, directly challenging competitors Anthropic, Google and xAI.

In a follow-up response to VentureBeat, OpenAI communications confirmed that the June email was simply a scheduled reminder and that there are currently no plans to remove GPT-4.5 from ChatGPT subscriptions, where the model remains available. Despite the strong reaction, OpenAI had in fact already announced the plan to deprecate GPT-4.5 Preview back in April 2025 during the launch of GPT-4.1. Some described GPT-4.5 as a daily tool in their workflow, praising its tone and reliability.

Like previous GPT models from OpenAI, GPT-4 was trained using publicly available data, including from public web pages, as well as data that OpenAI licensed. At that time, the company stated that developers would have three months to transition away from 4.5. OpenAI framed the model as an experimental offering that provided insights for future development, and said it would carry forward learnings from GPT-4.5 into future iterations — particularly in areas like creativity and writing nuance. The GPT-4.1 models should help software engineers who are using ChatGPT to write or debug code, OpenAI spokesperson Shaokyi Amdo told TechCrunch.

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We’re only speculating at this time, as we’re in new territory with generative AI. Google is developing Bard, an alternative to ChatGPT that will be available in Google Search. Meanwhile, OpenAI has not stopped improving the ChatGPT chatbot, and it recently released the powerful GPT-4 update. Llama 4 Maverick currently doesn’t seem to have any restrictions on use or image generation for free users, and can be used via Meta’s suite of apps such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, which makes it much easier to use.