OpenAI's release of GPT-4.5 for ChatGPT Plus subscribers this week had me immediately keen to try it out, though with some skepticism. There had been reports of OpenAI (and other developers) struggling to make the big improvements to their models we've seen before. And the current standard model GPT-4o, is pretty good in most cases. And if you want a comprehensive report, there's the Deep Research feature.
OpenAI claims that GPT-4.5 has a high emotional intelligence and nuanced understanding of what you say to it. The company's description painted a picture of both models as reliable friends, but that GPT-4.5 would be the one you'd expect a book of poetry from on your birthday. So, I decided to test 4.5 against 4o with a few prompts that any casual ChatGPT user might deploy.
