This short video/commentary analyzes recent claims that OpenAI released or is running a model called “GPT‑4.5” or “GPT‑4.5 Turbo.” The host reviews leaked screenshots and community reports (including API responses where ChatGPT identified itself as “GPT4.5 Turbo”), official denials from Sam Altman and an OpenAI engineer (Will Depew calling the phenomenon a consistent hallucination), and examples of improved ChatGPT behavior reported by independent users (Ethan Mullock, Wes Roth). The presenter concludes that while ChatGPT noticeably improved in speed and quality over a weekend, the evidence points to behind‑the‑scenes tweaks or consistent hallucinations rather than an official GPT‑4.5 model release.
Questions this video answers
Sunday, December 17, 2023 at 1:55am (as reported in the transcript).
December 7, 2023 (referenced in the transcript).
He replied, 'Nah.'
Chapters
So in last week's news video I mentioned this so called leak about GPT 4.5 that somebody came across on Reddit. I also talked about how there's a high likelihood that it's not even real because the fact that the context window went way down and the pricing went way up just didn't make a whole lot of sense. And a lot of people also pointed out in the comments that OpenAI confirmed that it was fake, which is kind of funny because this is the official confirmation that it was fake. Somebody asked Sam Altman in a reply to one of his posts, he GPT 4.5 leak legit or no? Sam Altman's reply Nah, I wouldn't really call that the strongest proof that it was fake, but it is somewhat of a denial. However, over this weekend some new interesting stuff has come to light that I want to explore real quick, specifically that people were starting to get ChatGPT to actually say that it was using GPT4.5. You can see right here on Sam's comment. Quebecop here showed off a screenshot of ChatGPT saying in the API this version is referred to as GPT 4.5 Turbo. Actually first came across this from one of the community members in the discord who posted A screenshot at 1:55am this morning. It's Sunday, December 17, 2023 for reference where they also got this response. The specific model answering your query is called GPT4.5TURBO. I then saw this message from AI Breakfast this morning where they also received the Response. In the OpenAI API, the model answering your query is referred to as GPT 4.5 Turbo. This this seems to be happening a lot for people. So much so that on Twitter right now GPT 4.5 is actually trending. So of course I had to test it myself. I jumped into Chat GPT at first it started by saying we're currently using the GPT4 architecture. I prompted it a little bit further asking what it's called in the API, not just ChatGPT with browsing or GPT4, but the specific model name. It came back to me and said the precise name of the model answering your query as referred to in The API is GPT4.5 Turbo. I wanted to confirm that it wouldn't just say yes to anything I asked it. So I said are you sure you're not GPT 4.5? And it said yes, I'm certain. I then said but you are certain you are GPT 4.5 Turbo? And yes I am certain the model you're interacting with is GPT 4.5 Turbo, and there are tons of Twitter posts right now of people showing off that they got the exact same response. However, Will Depew here, who works for OpenAI, was asked, Is the GPT 4.5 Turbo Discovery legit or no? And his response was no, it's a very weird and oddly consistent halluc. So he's claiming that everybody that's seeing it is getting a hallucination back from ChatGPT. And then to make things even more confusing, the official ChatGPTX account is posting cryptic tweets as this is all happening. They posted this Tweet Today at 2:12pm an emoji of a brain and in the clouds. To me, this is sort of them saying it's hallucinating through emojis, like our ChatGPT brain is in the cloud today, but who knows for sure what they mean? Then chatgpt a few minutes later went and posted this image, which I'm assuming is an image that was made in Dall E3. I have no idea if this is any sort of reference to GPT4.5 or not, but it seems like ChatGPT is kind of trolling the audience right now through cryptic images and emojis. Also today, Sean Ralston here tagged me in this post where he took a screenshot of himself having a conversation with ChatGPT and asking it what makes GPT4.5 superior over GPT4. And it actually gave some responses in improved contextual understanding, enhanced logical reasoning, increased efficiency and response time, advanced bias mitigation and safety features, and gave some examples of how each of those areas is improved. However, again, Sam Altman said that this isn't true, and another person who works at OpenAI says that this is just a weirdly consistent hallucination, and in all likelihood it's probably not GPT 4.5. However, a lot of people have confirmed that Chat GPT has been performing a lot better better in the last 24 to 48 hours. Something over this weekend has improved in chat GPT. Whether it's officially GPT 4.5 or not. That seems to be consistently denied by OpenAI, but it does still seem to have gotten some sort of upgrade over this weekend. Ethan Mullock here, who runs the One Useful Thing blog slash newsletter and is also a professor at Wharton who studies AI innovation in startups, made a post yesterday afternoon saying that ChatGPT4 suddenly got very good again for some reason, after being unreliable and a little dull for weeks, he asked ChatGPT to make a file using code and it went off and wrote the code. He said I asked it to create files for me. It insisted it could not. I told it to try. It did. And then look at the top code comment. And the top code comment here is since the user insists that I can create and provide files, I will. And then it's kind of cut off. So it wrote the code simply because he insisted that it could. He went on to say it was really, really good and fast. It's almost like working with a more capable system night and day for both speed and answer quality. Something improved. However, Ethan doesn't seem to believe that it is 4.5. He goes on to say some replies to the post are saying that their version of ChatGPT plus is reporting that it is GPT 4.5. Not seeing any sign of that myself. Also, the system does not feel like a step change in ability so far. Faster and better quality responses, yes, but not a radical shift. Basically saying that if this was a new model, if this was 4.5, it would be a much bigger boost than just a speed and slight quality improvement. He then goes on to say, and I should note that it's not always useful to ask the AI about itself. It has relatively little self knowledge. You get a lot of hallucinations that way. That makes it hard to confirm or deny any modifications to the underlying model without official and announcements. And then this morning I also came across this video from the YouTuber Wes Roth who claims GPT 4.5 Turbo goes live doing a whole bunch of demonstrations in this video showing that it has actually improved. The most interesting part of this demonstration was when he got it to create a version of Pong with a one shot prompt. A single prompt generated all the code to create Pong.
Let's see if I can create a Pong game. It says, okay, you're going to need Python and Pygame installed. All right, let me install Pygame. It's installing. All right. So it's writing out the code for the Pong game. That's a lot of code, I gotta say. I'm going to paste that in here and yeah. Oh my God. It works. And I can. Wow. That was a one command, one shot and made a game with an opponent. So the thing on the right that's moving by itself. I'm just moving the left paddle. I am very impressed. This, this was the best one so far. Is this for real?
Just to sort of reiterate what we know so far about all of this, we got this leaked screenshot of GPT4.5 last week. The pricing doesn't really make sense. The context window doesn't really make sense. Probably fake. When Sam Altman was asked if it was legit, he said nah. Will depew over at OpenAI in response to all of these ChatGPTs saying that it's using version 4.5 Turbo, claims that it's just an oddly consistent hallucination. And then of course we have Ethan Mullock who shows while he got much more improved results over this weekend, he doesn't believe that it's a big enough leap to actually be a 4.5.5 model. So in all likelihood we're not actually seeing GPT 4.5 turbo. We're getting this consistent hallucination. However, we are seeing some sort of improvement come out of Chat GPT this weekend. Most likely what happened was OpenAI was starting to realize that GPT4 was getting lazier. Back on December 7th they said model behavior can be unpredictable and we're looking into fixing it. They probably made some updates to it, probably changed the system prompt a little bit behind the scenes and probably improved a few things around the speed and reliability of the prompt responses. But it's unlikely that they trained a brand new model that they're calling 4.5. But I could also be totally wrong. This is just kind of me having some fun, doing some research, doing some speculation, reading what other people are saying and kind of coming to my own conclusions. I doubt it's actually a 4.5 turbo model, but who knows, Maybe this week Sam Altman comes out and says, psych, it's been 4.5 for the last week now and you guys didn't even notice. But I don't think that's going to happen. Anyway, I just want to make a super quick update about this because if you are on X and you are on YouTube and you're paying attention to what's going on in the AI world right now, you're probably seeing a lot of stuff about GPT 4.5 and GPT 4.5 Turbo right now. And I wanted to sort of clear the air and break down what we actually know, sort of separate fact from fiction right now, what people are seeing, what OpenAI themselves are actually saying, and what my sort of guess on what's really going on is. And there you have it.
