Sam Altman wrote in February that GPT-4.5 would be "our last non-chain-of-thought model" [1], but GPT-4.1 also does not have internal chain-of-thought [2].

It seems like OpenAI keeps changing its plans. Deprecating GPT-4.5 less than 2 months after introducing it also seems unlikely to be the original plan. Changing plans is necessarily a bad thing, but I wonder why.

Did they not expect this model to turn out as well as it did?

[1] https://x.com/sama/status/1889755723078443244

[2] https://github.com/openai/openai-cookbook/blob/6a47d53c967a0...

Anyone making claims with a horizon beyond two months about structure or capabilities will be wrong - it's sama's job to show confidence and vision and calm stakeholders, but if you're paying attention to the field, the release and research cycles are still contracting, with no sense of slowing any time soon. I've followed AI research daily since GPT-2, the momentum is incredible, and even if the industry sticks with transformers, there are years left of low hanging fruit and incremental improvements before things start slowing.

There doesn't appear to be anything that these AI models cannot do, in principle, given sufficient data and compute. They've figured out multimodality and complex integration, self play for arbitrary domains, and lots of high-cost longer term paradigms that will push capabilities forwards for at least 2 decades in conjunction with Moore's law.

Things are going to continue getting better, faster, and weirder. If someone is making confident predictions beyond those claims, it's probably their job.

Maybe that's why they named this model 4.1, despite coming out after 4.5 and supposedly outperforming it. They can pretend GPT-4.5 is the last non-chain-of-thought model by just giving all non-chain-of-thought-models version numbers below 4.5

Why do you expect to believe a single word Sam Altman says?

I think that people balked at the cost of 4.5 and really wanted just a slightly more improved 4o . Now it almost seems that they will have a separate products that are non chain of thought and chain of thought series which actually makes sense because some want a cheap model and some don't.

> Deprecating GPT-4.5 less than 2 months after introducing it also seems unlikely to be the original plan.

Well they actually hinted already of possible depreciation in their initial announcement of gpt4.5 [0]. Also, as others said, this model was already offered in the api as chatgpt-latest, but there was no checkpoint which made it unreliable for actual use.

[0] https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-4-5/#:~:text=we%E2%...

When I saw them say 'no more non COT models', I was minorly panicked.

While their competitors have made fantastic models, at the time I perceived ChatGPT4 was the best model for many applications. COT was often tricked by my prompts, assuming things to be true, when a non-COT model would say something like 'That isnt necessarily the case'.

I use both COT and non when I have an important problem.

Seeing them keep a non-COT model around is a good idea.

Perhaps it is a distilled 4.5, or based on it's lineage, as some suggested.