Welcome toNeural.AI moves fast. We help you keep up.OpenAI has officially unveiled GPT-4.5, the latest version of the fastest ChatGPT model. While GPT-4.5 excels in a number of areas including accuracy and emotional intelligence, OpenAI emphasizes that GPT-4.5 is not its most advanced model for now.GPT-4.5 is smarter, warmer, and not yet available for everyone OpenAI knows that its various models and model names are confusing. GPT-4.5 isnt here to help. In fact, while GPT-4.5 is the newest model release, OpenAI says that its o3 reasoning model remains its most powerful. It describes GPT-4.5 as a research preview and not a frontier model.Later this year, OpenAI expects to introduce GPT-5 as a single model that handles quick chat requests and more intensive reasoning requests without switching models.For now, GPT-4.5 is here to replace GPT-4o with more accuracy, fewer hallucinations, and higher emotional intelligence. The latter quality is something Anthropics Claude chatbot has been praised for, especially when compared to ChatGPTs less natural responses before now.For example, GPT-4.5 may invite users to continue a conversation rather than simply provide detailed information as a response. The new model is also more succinct and conversational, according to OpenAI.Starting today, GPT-4.5 is available to Pro subscribers in the $200/month plan, but the new model is coming to more users starting next week. OpenAI says it will start rolling out GPT-4.5 to ChatGPT Plus ($20/month) and Team subscribers next week, followed by Enterprise and Edu users the following week.Watch the 13-minute livestream reveal below:For a deeper dive, you can read OpenAIs 30-page system card on GPT-4.5 here.Beyond OpenAIWhile OpenAI continues to forge ahead, former key players at OpenAI who left the company have founded new startups that are raising money and building new AI tools.Mira Murati, the former Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI, recently announced her AI startup called Thinking Machines Lab. Murati has brought along more than 30 experts from OpenAI, Meta, and Google DeepMind.Co-founder Lilian Weng previously served as Vice President of AI safety and robotics as well as applied research at OpenAI. John Schulman, another OpenAI co-founder, joined Thinking Machines from Anthropic where he served as a researcher.Thinking Machines Lab is focused on multimodal AI models and products that are accessible with practical applications.Heres how Thinking Machines Lab describes its focus in part:While AI capabilities have advanced dramatically, key gaps remain. The scientific communitys understanding of frontier AI systems lags behind rapidly advancing capabilities. Knowledge of how these systems are trained is concentrated within the top research labs, limiting both the public discourse on AI and peoples abilities to use AI effectively. And, despite their potential, these systems remain difficult for people to customize to their specific needs and values. To bridge the gaps, were building Thinking Machines Lab to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable and generally capable. []Emphasis on human-AI collaboration.Instead of focusing solely on making fully autonomous AI systems, we are excited to build multimodal systems that work with people collaboratively.More flexible, adaptable, and personalized AI systems.We see enormous potential for AI to help in every field of work. While current systems excel at programming and mathematics, were building AI that can adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise and enable a broader spectrum of applications.The company is seeking to raise $1 billion at a $9 billion valuation, according to Business Insider.Ilya Sutskever, former OpenAI chief scientist, co-founded another AI startup called Safe Superintelligence with ex-OpenAI researcher Daniel Levy and former Apple AI projects lead Daniel Gross.Heres how SSI explains its purpose:Building safe superintelligence (SSI) is the most important technical problem of our time.We have started the worlds first straight-shot SSI lab, with one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence.Its called Safe Superintelligence Inc.SSI is our mission, our name, and our entire product roadmap, because it is our sole focus. Our team, investors, and business model are all aligned to achieve SSI.We approach safety and capabilities in tandem, as technical problems to be solved through revolutionary engineering and scientific breakthroughs. We plan to advance capabilities as fast as possible while making sure our safety always remains ahead.This way, we can scale in peace.SSI raised its first $1 billion in September 2024. More recently, SSI has reportedly been seeking an additional $1 billion at a $30 billion market valuation.A third AI startup from a former OpenAI veteran to have on your radar is Eureka Labs, which is creating an AI-native educational platform. Former OpenAI research scientist and founding member Andrej Karpathy has been building Eureka Labs since 2024. He currently served as director of AI at Tesla.The startup announced its mission and first product-in-development in July 2024:We are Eureka Labs and we are building a new kind of school that is AI native.How can we approach an ideal experience for learning something new? For example, in the case of physics one could imagine working through very high quality course materials together with Feynman, who is there to guide you every step of the way. Unfortunately, subject matter experts who are deeply passionate, great at teaching, infinitely patient and fluent in all of the worlds languages are also very scarce and cannot personally tutor all 8 billion of us on demand.However, with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable. The teacher still designs the course materials, but they are supported, leveraged and scaled with an AI Teaching Assistant who is optimized to help guide the students through them. This Teacher + AI symbiosis could run an entire curriculum of courses on a common platform. If we are successful, it will be easy for anyone to learn anything, expanding education in both reach (a large number of people learning something) and extent (any one person learning a large amount of subjects, beyond what may be possible today unassisted).Our first product will be the worlds obviously best AI course,LLM101n. This is an undergraduate-level class that guides the student through training their own AI, very similar to a smaller version of the AI Teaching Assistant itself. The course materials will be available online, but we also plan to run both digital and physical cohorts of people going through it together.Today, we are heads down building LLM101n, but we look forward to a future where AI is a key technology for increasing human potential.More to come for Eureka Labs. In the meantime, Karpathy regularly shares his knowledge in course-length videos on YouTube:Lastly, Meta is reportedly developing a standalone AI app that will debut as soon as the second quarter of this year. CNBC reports:The company intends to debut a Meta AI standalone app during the second quarter, according to people familiar with the matter. It marks a major step in Meta CEOMark Zuckerbergsplans to make his company the leader in artificial intelligence by the end of the year, ahead of competitors such as OpenAI andAlphabet, said the people, who asked not to be named because the project is confidential.News of Meta possibly focusing its AI efforts into a standalone app and not just inside of Facebook and WhatsApp prompted OpenAIs Sam Altman to quip on X, ok fine maybe well do a social app.More on the latest in AI developments in the next edition ofNeural only on 9to5Mac! 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