OpenAI has recently made ChatGPT available to users without requiring an account. It’s a big upgrade, making the chatbot even more accessible. However, I explained that the ChatGPT experience can be significantly improved by registering an account with OpenAI.
After getting an account, you can get a ChatGPT Plus subscription, which gives you access to OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT upgrades.
It so happens that OpenAI just released a big upgrade for ChatGPT, the GPT-4.5 Turbo model. It’ll make ChatGPT better at everything it can do while improving the tone and reducing verbosity. Also, GPT-4.5 Turbo has a better data set, being trained with public information available as of December 2023.
But you will need to be a paying subscriber to get all these upgrades. The GPT-4.5 Turbo update is available to ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Enterprise users.
“Our new GPT-4 Turbo is now available to paid ChatGPT users,” OpenAI said on X, where it announced the upgrade. “We’ve improved capabilities in writing, math, logical reasoning, and coding.”
OpenAI added that ChatGPT will provide responses that are “more direct, less verbose, and use more conversational language.”
That’s certainly a great upgrade for the overall experience. It resembles the kind of ChatGPT chats you can get with a few tweaks to improve the chatbot’s tones. Those ChatGPT tricks are possible via prompts or custom instructions. But having GPT-4.5 Turbo automatically adjust verbosity and tone is much better.
OpenAI extended the context window to December 2023 from the previous April 2023 cutoff. That means ChatGPT has been trained with public information available up to December 2023. The chatbot can search the internet for newer data when you ask questions related to events outside that cutoff.
I happen to have an active ChatGPT Plus subscription, so I checked the cutoff date. ChatGPT told me it’s December 2023, which means the GPT-4.5 Turbo upgrade has already been rolled out to Europe.
ChatGPT 4.5 Turbo is still slower than ChatGPT 3.5 (the free variant) when generating answers, but it’ll get the job done. That said, generative AI chatbots aren’t perfect, they’ll get things wrong, and they’ll hallucinate information. GPT-4.5 Turbo will not fix any of that.
We have no idea when the GPT-5 rollout will begin or what the upgrade will offer. Given Google’s massive Gemini 1.5 Pro upgrade for enterprise users, I’d expect OpenAI to want to match it sooner rather than later.
As a reminder, OpenAI Sam Altman failed to provide a release window for GPT-5 in a recent interview, saying the company has plenty of other things to talk about until that milestone is reached. GPT-4 Turbo appears to be one of them.