Skip to main content

ChatGPT just improved its creative writing chops

a phone displaying the ChatGPT homepage on a beige background.
Sanket Mishra / Pexels

One of the great strengths of ChatGPT is its ability to aid in creative writing. ChatGPT’s latest large language model, GPT-4o, has received a bit of a performance boost, OpenAI announced Wednesday. Users can reportedly expect “more natural, engaging, and tailored writing to improve relevance & readability” moving forward.

GPT-4o got an update 🎉

The model’s creative writing ability has leveled up–more natural, engaging, and tailored writing to improve relevance & readability.

It’s also better at working with uploaded files, providing deeper insights & more thorough responses.

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) November 20, 2024

GPT-4o, not to be confused with 01 (formerly Project Strawberry), is OpenAI’s latest publicly available model, surpassing GPT-4 and GPT-3.5. GPT-4o was first released in May 2024 and offers users double the performance at half the resource cost of its direct predecessor, GPT-4-Turbo, as well as state-of-the-art benchmark results in voice, multilingual, and vision tasks. Not only is it more efficient than older versions but it offers a host of additional capabilities. The model’s rapid response pace makes it especially useful for real-time translation and conversation applications.

Recommended Videos

For example, ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode would not be possible without the near-instantaneous text, voice, and audio inference that GPT-4o offers (and that previous models did not). GPT-4o boasts improved reasoning skills over its predecessors as well, able to interpret a user’s spoken tone and intention, understand unique aspects of their tone, pace, and mood, and reply in kind.

While GPT-4o is technically available to every OpenAI subscriber level, including the free tier, it is not available for unlimited use. Free-tier users will find that they can only access the new model a handful of times on ChatGPT before being shunted down to interact with the smaller GPT-4o-mini model. Plus, Teams, and Enterprise subscribers have a rate limit roughly five times higher.

GPT-4o-mini is based on the same training data as its larger sibling, but leverages fewer variables (not to mention fewer compute resources) in its inference operations. Being lighter-weight and more responsive, GPT-40-mini has proven useful in a variety of small-scale applications including computer code generation.

OpenAI claims GPT-4o mini is “the most capable and cost-efficient small model available today,” per CNBC, out-performing competitors like Google’s Gemini 1.5 Flash, Meta’s Llama 3 8b, or Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku in a variety of benchmarks. According to data from Artificial Analysis, 40-mini scored 82% on the MMLU reasoning benchmark, topping Gemini by 3% and Claude 3 Haiku by 7%.

Andrew Tarantola
Andrew Tarantola is a journalist with more than a decade reporting on emerging technologies ranging from robotics and machine…
ChatGPT o1 vs. o3 vs. 4o: Which should you use?
ChatGPT on a laptop

We're now into the third year of the AI boom, and industry leaders are showing no signs of slowing down, pushing out newer and (presumably) more capable models on a regular basis. ChatGPT, of course, remains the undisputed leader.

But with more than a half-dozen models available from OpenAI alone, figuring out which one to use for your specific project can be a daunting task.
o1

Read more
ChatGPT vs. Perplexity: battle of the AI search engines
Perplexity on Nothing Phone 2a.

The days of Google's undisputed internet search dominance may be coming to an end. The rise of generative AI has ushered in a new means of finding information on the web, with ChatGPT and Perplexity AI leading the way.

Unlike traditional Google searches, these platforms scour the internet for information regarding your query, then synthesize an answer using a conversational tone rather than returning a list of websites where the information can be found. This approach has proven popular with users, even though it's raised some serious concerns with the content creators that these platforms scrape for their data. But which is best for you to actually use? Let's dig into how these two AI tools differ, and which will be the most helpful for your prompts.
Pricing and tiers
Perplexity is available at two price points: free and Pro. The free tier is available to everybody and offers unlimited "Quick" searches, 3 "Pro" searches per day, and access to the standard Perplexity AI model. The Pro plan, which costs $20/month, grants you unlimited Quick searches, 300 Pro searches per day, your choice of AI model (GPT-4o, Claude-3, or LLama 3.1), the ability to upload and analyze unlimited files as well as visualize answers using Playground AI, DALL-E, and SDXL.

Read more
​​OpenAI spills tea on Musk as Meta seeks block on for-profit dreams
A digital image of Elon Musk in front of a stylized background with the Twitter logo repeating.

OpenAI has been on a “Shipmas” product launch spree, launching its highly-awaited Sora video generator and onboarding millions of Apple ecosystem members with the Siri-ChatGPT integration. The company has also expanded its subscription portfolio as it races toward a for-profit status, which is reportedly a hot topic of debate internally.

Not everyone is happy with the AI behemoth abandoning its nonprofit roots, including one of its founding fathers and now rival, Elon Musk. The xAI chief filed a lawsuit against OpenAI earlier this year and has also been consistently taking potshots at the company.

Read more