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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.
In truth, there at the moment are a complete of seven (!!!) completely different AI fashions that paying ChatGPT subscribers (of the $20 Plus tier and dearer tiers) can select between when interacting with the trusty chatbot — every with its personal strengths and weaknesses.
These embrace:
- 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 determine which one to make use of for his or her explicit immediate, query, or process? In spite of everything, you may solely decide one after the other.
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Is assistance on the best way?
Assist seems to be on the best way imminently from OpenAI — as stories emerged over the previous couple of days on X from AI influencers, together with OpenAI’s personal researcher “Roon (@tszzl on X)” (imagined to be technical staff member Tarun Gogineni) — of a brand new “router” perform that may mechanically choose the very best OpenAI mannequin to answer the person’s enter on the fly, relying on the particular enter’s content material.
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 desire a mannequin router I need to have the ability to choose the fashions I exploit”:
“You’ll nonetheless have the ability to choose. It is a product to be sure that docs aren’t caught 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 slightly 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 “repair mannequin 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. 🙂“
Whereas a presumably much more superior GPT-5 mannequin would (and can) be big information if and when launched, the router might make life a lot simpler and extra clever for the common ChatGPT subscriber.
It could additionally observe on the heels of different third-party merchandise such because the web-based Token Monster chatbot, which mechanically choose and mix responses from a number of third-party LLMs to answer person queries.
Requested in regards to the router thought and feedback from “Roon,” an OpenAI spokesperson declined to supply a response or additional info at the moment.
Fixing the overabundance of alternative 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 exact mannequin is nice for and designed to assist with.
For instance, OpenAI’s “o” sequence reasoning fashions — o3, o4-mini, o4-mini excessive — have carried out higher on math, science, and coding checks due to benchmarking checks, whereas non-reasoning fashions like the brand new GPT-4.5 and 4.1 appear to do higher at artistic writing and communications duties.
Devoted AI influencers and energy customers might perceive very nicely what all these completely different fashions are good and never so good at.
However common customers who don’t observe the trade as intently, 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 might 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 could possibly be certainly one of life or loss of life.
It’s additionally attention-grabbing to take a position on how an automated LLM router would possibly change public perceptions towards and adoption of AI extra broadly.
ChatGPT already counted 500 million lively customers as of March. If extra of those folks had been mechanically guided towards extra clever and succesful LLMs to deal with their AI queries, the affect of AI on their workloads and that of all the international economic system would appear more likely to be felt much more acutely, making a optimistic “snowball” impact.
That’s, as extra folks noticed extra features from ChatGPT mechanically choosing the proper AI mannequin for his or her queries, and as extra enterprises reaped higher effectivity from this course of, increasingly more people and organizations would possible be satisfied by the utility of AI and be extra prepared to pay for it, and as they did so, even extra AI-powered workflows would unfold out on the planet.
However proper now, that is presumably all being held again slightly by the truth that the ChatGPT mannequin picker requires the person to A. know they also have a alternative 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 gazing aisles of cereal and completely different sauces, the common ChatGPT person is at the moment confronted with an overabundance of alternative.
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.
