🧙🏼 GPT-4.5 rolling out now!

Howdy, wizards.

I use AI every day for work on my laptop, but it’s also a big helper in my everyday life while I’m on the go. Wanted to share a quick screenshot of how the main screen of my phone looks like these days (spoiler: it’s like Hogwarts for apps), and how I use these tools.

Here’s how I use AI on my phone:

ChatGPT: I use GPT-4o as my go-to for easy, everyday questions. If it’s a complex question or it needs to do some calculation, I switch to the o1 model. If I run out of o1 credits (happens all the time), I switch to the second best reasoning model, o3-mini-high. I always use the dictation/microphone button to ask questions, not voice mode. This way I don’t need to type anything and the AI won’t interrupt my thought process (like voice mode does). I only use voice mode if I need to use AI while my hands are busy, like driving or cooking, or if I’m feeling lazy and don’t want to read the answer. I also use the Attach Photo or Take Photo features frequently to make sense of things in my environment, translating stuff, transcribing text, etc. I’m using ChatGPT Plus at $20/mo.

Claude: Claude is the best at natural communication (though it just got some serious competition — more on that later), which is why I use Sonnet 3.7 to help me write stuff. Like if I need to contact customer support somewhere about an issue, I’ll use dictation and explain the situation to Claude, which gives me an email to send. Any text I want to draft and that’s intended to be seen by another human being, Claude’s my go-to. I’m using Claude Pro at $18/mo.

Perplexity: I use Perplexity basically as a Google replacement. It’s the fastest web-searching AI you’ll get, and it shows you images and sources in an intuitive way. Also the new deep research feature is amazing if you need to dig deep on a topic. It hallucinates a bit but I’d say it’s the best free option for synthesising information from many different sources, including real-time info. I’m using Perplexity’s free version as it includes enough usage for my occasional use.

The type of stuff I use AI for on my phone is quite different than what I do on my desktop. There, it’s more work-related things: document processing, strategy, copywriting, coding, image gen, data analysis, custom GPTs…less dragons.

Was this helpful to you? Hit reply and let me know, and I’ll share more personal insights like this.

Now, brace yourselves, here’s what’s brewing in AI.

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DARIO’S PICKS

1. GPT-4.5 just rolled into model pickers everywhere

OpenAI released GPT-4.5 last week—it’s the biggest, fanciest, most wallet-draining model to date. It was only available on Pro until today, when I (still a mere Plus subscriber) saw this landing in my model picker:

Here’s the deets on the newest member of the OpenAI model family:

• It’s not a reasoning model like o1 or the more recent o3-mini. Rather, it’s based on scaling unsupervised learning—a machine learning technique where unlabeled data is used to find patterns without prior knowledge of the outcomes. That makes it awesome at recognizing patterns and draw connections—which makes the conversations with it feel more natural and gives it greater “emotional intelligence”.

• The achievement of this model is less about crushing benchmarks and more about increasing understanding of human intent and being better at everyday tasks.

• It has search, supports file/image uploads and can use Canvas; however it doesn’t have voice mode, video and screensharing at the moment.

• It’s only available on ChatGPT Pro right now, but Plus and Team users should be given access some time this week.

• All this juicy natural conversation goodness comes at a high price tag for those who want to build apps with it. At $75/$150 per million input/output tokens, GPT-4.5 is about 15-30x more expensive to use than GPT-4o.

• Since GPT-4.5 is based on pre-training and doesn’t think before responding—like the “o-series” of models do—it’s better as a general purpose model. Better models based on pre-training means a stronger foundation for reasoning approaches—and the two approaches will compliment each other to continue to scale even more advanced models.

On Twitter, Sam Altman asked GPT-4.5 about something interesting, namely the nature of consciousness, here’s its conclusion (end of a longer answer):

*Reminder that Sam Altman is selling a product

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ I’ve had my hands on GPT-4.5 for just about an hour as I write this. Had time for just a few prompts back and forth. I like it so far, it’s got style. Claude might get a run for its vibes. Will report back once I’ve taken it for a real spin.

I think directionally OpenAI is moving towards a more sticky product with these type of improvements. We’re tired of dull, homogenized AI content.

SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION (FOR SOMETHING ACTUALLY USEFUL)

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THAT’S ALL FOLKS!

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