GPT-4.1 in the API

To be honest I think this is most AI labs (particularly the American ones) not-so-secret goal now, for a number of strong reasons. You can see it in this announcements, Anthrophic's recent Claude 3.7 announcement, OpenAI's first planned agent (SWE-Agent), etc etc. They have to justify their worth somehow and they see it as a potential path to do that. Remains to be seen how far they will get - I hope I'm wrong.

The reasons however for picking this path IMO are:

- Their usage statistics show coding as the main user: Anthrophic recently released their stats. Its become the main usage of these models, with other usages at best being novelty or conveniences for people in relative size. Without this market IMO the hype would of already fizzled awhile ago at best a novelty when looking at the rest of the user base size.

- They "smell blood" to disrupt and fear is very effective to promote their product: This IMO is the biggest one. Disrupting software looks to be an achievable goal, but it also is a goal that has high engagement compared to other use cases. No point solving something awesome if people don't care, or only care for awhile (e.g. meme image generation). You can see the developers on this site and elsewhere in fear. Fear is the best marketing tool ever and engagement can last years. It keeps people engaged and wanting to know more; and talking about how "they are cooked" almost to the exclusion of everything else (i.e. focusing on the threat). Nothing motivates you to know a product more than not being able to provide for yourself, your family, etc to the point that most other tech topics/innovations are being drowned out by AI announcements.

- Many of them are losing money and need a market to disrupt: Currently the existing use cases of a chat bot are not yet impressive enough (or haven't been till very recently) to justify the massive valuations of these companies. Its coding that is allowing them to bootstrap into other domains.

- It is a domain they understand: AI dev's know models, they understand the software process. It may be a complex domain requiring constant study, but they know it back to front. This makes it a good first case for disruption where the data, and the know how is already with the teams.

TL;DR: They are coming after you, because it is a big fruit that is easier to pick for them than other domains. Its also one that people will notice either out of excitement (CEO, VC's, Management, etc) or out of fear (tech workers, academics, other intellectual workers).

That would have been quite far down on my list of "major (unexpected) consequences of phones and social media"...

Well they actually hinted already of possible depreciation in their initial announcement of gpt4.5 [0]. Also, as others said, this model was already offered in the api as chatgpt-latest, but there was no checkpoint which made it unreliable for actual use.

[0] https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-4-5/#:~:text=we%E2%...

While their competitors have made fantastic models, at the time I perceived ChatGPT4 was the best model for many applications. COT was often tricked by my prompts, assuming things to be true, when a non-COT model would say something like 'That isnt necessarily the case'.

I use both COT and non when I have an important problem.

Seeing them keep a non-COT model around is a good idea.