Within the 2.5 years since OpenAI debuted ChatGPT, the variety of giant language fashions (LLMs) that the corporate has made accessible as choices to energy its hit chatbot has steadily grown.
Actually, there are actually a complete of seven (!!!) totally different AI fashions that paying ChatGPT subscribers (of the $20 Plus tier and costlier tiers) can select between when interacting with the trusty chatbot — every with its personal strengths and weaknesses.
These embody:
GPT-4o
o3
o4-mini
o4-mini-high
GPT-4.5 (Analysis Preview)
GPT-4.1
GPT-4.1-mini
However how ought to a person resolve which one to make use of for his or her explicit immediate, query, or process? In any case, you’ll be able to solely decide separately.
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Is assistance on the way in which?
As Roon posted on the social community X yesterday, July 20, 2025, in since-deleted response to influencer Lisan al Gaib’s assertion that they “don’t want a model router I want to be able to select the models I use”:
“You’ll still be able to select. This is a product to make sure that doctors aren’t stuck on 4o-mini”
Equally, Yuchen Jin, Co-founder & CTO of AI inference cloud supplier Hyperbolic Labs, wrote in an X publish on July 19.
“Heard GPT-5 is imminent, from just a little fowl.
It’s not one mannequin, however a number of fashions. It has a router that switches between reasoning, non-reasoning, and tool-using fashions.
That’s why Sam stated they’d “fix model naming”: prompts will simply auto-route to the fitting mannequin.
GPT-6 is in coaching.
I simply hope they’re not delaying it for extra security checks. :)“
It might additionally observe on the heels of different third-party merchandise such because the web-based Token Monster chatbot, which robotically choose and mix responses from a number of third-party LLMs to reply to person queries.
Requested concerning the router concept and feedback from “Roon,” an OpenAI spokesperson declined to offer a response or additional info presently.
Fixing the overabundance of selection drawback
To be clear, each time OpenAI has launched a brand new LLM to the general public, it has diligently shared in both a weblog publish or launch notes or each what it thinks that individual mannequin is nice for and designed to assist with.
For instance, OpenAI’s “o” collection reasoning fashions — o3, o4-mini, o4-mini excessive — have carried out higher on math, science, and coding checks because of benchmarking checks, whereas non-reasoning fashions like the brand new GPT-4.5 and 4.1 appear to do higher at inventive writing and communications duties.
Devoted AI influencers and energy customers could perceive very properly what all these totally different fashions are good and never so good at.
However common customers who don’t observe the business as carefully, nor have the time and funds accessible to check all of them out on the identical enter prompts and evaluate the outputs, will understandably battle to make sense of the bewildering array of choices.
That would imply they’re lacking out on smarter, extra clever, or extra succesful responses from ChatGPT for his or her process at hand. And within the case of fields like medication, as Roon alluded to, the distinction might be considered one of life or dying.
It’s additionally attention-grabbing to take a position on how an computerized LLM router may change public perceptions towards and adoption of AI extra broadly.
ChatGPT already counted 500 million energetic customers as of March. If extra of those folks have been robotically guided towards extra clever and succesful LLMs to deal with their AI queries, the impression of AI on their workloads and that of the complete international financial system would appear more likely to be felt much more acutely, making a constructive “snowball” impact.
That’s, as extra folks noticed extra positive factors from ChatGPT robotically choosing the proper AI mannequin for his or her queries, and as extra enterprises reaped better effectivity from this course of, an increasing number of people and organizations would doubtless be satisfied by the utility of AI and be extra keen to pay for it, and as they did so, much more AI-powered workflows would unfold out on the earth.
However proper now, that is presumably all being held again just a little by the truth that the ChatGPT mannequin picker requires the person to A. know they actually have a selection of fashions and B. have some stage of knowledgeable consciousness of what these fashions are good for. It’s all nonetheless a manually pushed course of.
Like going to the grocery store in your city and looking at aisles of cereal and totally different sauces, the typical ChatGPT person is at present confronted with an overabundance of selection.
Hopefully any hypothetical OpenAI router seamlessly helps direct them to the fitting mannequin product for his or her wants, once they want it — like a trusty shopkeeper exhibiting as much as free you out of your product paralysis.
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