[HarHarVeryFunny]

OpenAI have apparently said that GPT 4.5 has a knowledge cutoff date of October 2023, and their System Card for it says "GPT 4.5 is NOT a frontier model" (my emphasis).

It seems this may be an older model that they chose not to release at the time, and are only doing so now due to feeling pressure to release something after recent releases by DeepSeek, Grok, Google and Anthropic. Perhaps they did some post-training to "polish the turd" and give it the better personality that seems to be one of it's few improvements.

Hard to say why it's so expensive - because it's big and expensive to serve, or for some marketing/PR reason. It seems that many sources are confirming that the benefits of scaling up pre-training (more data, bigger model) are falling off, so maybe this is what you get when you scale up GPT 4.0 by a factor of 10x - bigger, more expensive, and not significantly better. Cost to serve could also be high because, not intending to release it, they have never put the effort in to optimize it.

[refulgentis]

See, you get it: if we want to know nothing, we can know nothing.

For all we know, Beezlebub Herself is holding Sam Altman's conciousness captive at the behest of Nadella. The deal is Sam has to go "innie" and jack up OpenAI costs 100x over the next year so it can go under and Microsoft can get it all for free.

Have you seen anything to disprove that? Or even casting doubt on it?