WASHINGTON, Jul. 18 (Reuters) - ChatGPT maker OpenAI said on Thursday it was launching GPT-4o mini, a cost-efficient small AI model, aimed at making its technology more affordable and less energy-intensive, allowing the startup to target a broader pool of customers.

Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the market leader in the AI software space, has been working to make it cheaper and faster for developers to build applications based on its model, at a time when deep-pocketed rivals such as Meta and Google rush to grab a bigger share in the market.

Priced at 15 cents per million input tokens and 60 cents per million output tokens, the GPT-4o mini is more than 60% cheaper than GPT-3.5 Turbo, OpenAI said.

It currently outperforms the GPT-4 model on chat preferences and scored 82% on Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU), OpenAI said.

MMLU is a textual intelligence and reasoning benchmark used to evaluate the capabilities of language models. A higher MMLU score signifies it can understand and use language better across a variety of domains, enhancing real-world usage.

The GPT-4o mini model's score compared with 77.9% for Google's Gemini Flash and 73.8% for Anthropic's Claude Haiku, according to OpenAI.

Smaller language models require less computational power to run, making them a more affordable option for companies with limited resources looking to deploy generative AI in their operations.

With the mini model currently supporting text and vision in the application programming interface, OpenAI said support for text, image, video and audio inputs and outputs would be made available in the future.

ChatGPT's Free, Plus and Team users will be able to access GPT-4o mini — which has knowledge up to October 2023 — starting Thursday, in place of GPT-3.5 Turbo, with enterprise users gaining access starting next week, OpenAI said.

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