what is the difference between the multiple chat gbt models you may have heard of chat GPT 3.5 chat gbt 4 40 40 mini and then the newest series 01 preview and 01 mini what is the difference between all of those models and how do you know which one to use for each task how different are things like pricing and speed or anything else that you need to know first let's talk about where to find these models so first go to chat gp.com you'll open up this familiar interface and here on the upper left this is
your model selector so right now it's set to J GPT 40 and it has a nice little description here which I find to be true great for most tasks personally Chad GPT 40 is my default model and I rarely change it from GPT 40 but if you want to see more models here you have 40 mini as well as GPT 4 which is now considered the Legacy model which is so funny to me CU I remember when GPT 4 just came out so the most important thing to know is that each model is optimized for
different tasks so it is useful to know which one you should use to help you kind of get the most out of your interactions so GPT 4 even though it's Legacy model today when it first came out I found it substantially more capable than 3.5 for a wide variety of tasks problem solving creative writing content creation Etc however it's heavier on computational resources which makes it slower and a bit more expensive and that's why it's now considered a legacy model model earlier this year open AI announced GPT 40 which is lighter than GPT 4 it's
a more optimized version of gp4 that maintains really strong performance on most General tasks but it does it faster and cheaper so if you're doing everyday tasks like content creation brainstorming asking questions back and forth GPT 40 is in my opinion the best default choice and like I said at the beginning it's my default choice in chat GPT and I rarely change it now GPT 4 mini you can think of as kind of budget friendly alternative to GPT 4 so it's smaller it's faster and it's significantly cheaper while still being very good it's really great
for more straightforward tasks where you need efficiency for example if you are incorporating chat gpt's API into your app and you need faster response times that's a great use case for one of these mini models also when you're prototyping something or just testing things out I'll often start with the Mini model to make sure like everything is working as expected and then go ahead and switch to chat GPT 40 when things are ready to go just to recap if you're looking for a more cost-effective option and or faster responses then consider GPT 40 mini and
just last week open AI announced the 01 series that's 01 preview over here and 01 mini and these models are designed to excel at complex reasoning tasks especially science technology engineering and math these models are built to do step-by-step reasoning however they don't have access to some of the advanced tools that GPT 40 offers for example browsing the web or uploading files you currently cannot do that in o1 preview or o1 mini unless you're doing coding or heavy mathematics GPT 40 is going to be your best bet for probably like 99% of your tasks and
for those of you who might be wondering how is the o on model so much better at reasoning based tasks compared to GPT 40 the difference is in how open AI trains the different models so open AI today hasn't released all the details of how they train on preview but the best guess in the community based on open ai's announcements and the research papers they cited it's the difference between a teacher grading your homework based on getting the correct answer versus grading your homework and looking at your reasoning steps to arrive at the correct answer
models before 01 were trained with human feedback that said as long as the final answer is correct we're going to Mark the solution as correct whereas 01 preview and o1 mini are trained with human feedback that looks at the reasoning steps as well so the reasoning to arrive at the correct answer must also be correct in order for that solution to be marked as correct and one of the really neat things about the 01 series is that you can see its thought process and what's really cool about the one series is you can see its
thought process so here I just copied a hard sat math question you can actually expand this to see the thought process it's revisiting temperature scales revisiting options valuating temperature conversions comparing temperature shifts assessing the equivalence and then it's going through each option because this is like which which of these are true and and it's going through each option to evaluate whether it's true and the final answer is d one and two only which is correct and what's really cool here is you can expand its thought process so just to recap which model should you use
and for what purpose for almost every daily task like answering questions writing essays or content GPT 40 is often the best choice because it's an incredible balance of capabilities and it's also still very efficient but if you need faster results like you're integrating chat gbt in a product and you need faster response times or you need it significantly cheaper then consider for mini because it's faster and more coste efficient and if you're doing complex reasoning tasks such as math coding or engineering that's when you would look at o1 preview and if you need a faster
version of o1 preview that would be your 01 mini similarly trained as 01 preview but faster at reasoning again if you're integrating chat GPT into an application for example
