OpenAI debuts mini version of its most powerful model yet

OpenAI announced it will launch a new AI model, "GPT-4o mini," the artificial intelligence startup's latest effort to expand use of its popular chatbot, on Thursday.

The company called the new release "the most capable and cost-efficient small model available today," and it plans to integrate image, video and audio into it later.

The mini AI model is an offshoot of GPT-4o, OpenAI's fastest and most powerful model, which it launched in May during a livestreamed event with executives. The "o" in GPT-4o stands for omni, and GPT-4o has improved audio, video and text capabilities, with the ability to handle 50 different languages at improved speed and quality, according to the company.

OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, has been valued at more than $80 billion by investors. The company, founded in 2015, is under pressure to stay on top of the generative AI market while finding ways to make money as it spends massive sums on processors and infrastructure to build and train its models.

The mini AI model announced Thursday is part of OpenAI's push to be at the forefront of "multimodality," or the ability to offer a wide range of types of AI-generated media, like text, images, audio and video, inside one tool: ChatGPT.

Last year, OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap told CNBC: "The world is multimodal. If you think about the way we as humans process the world and engage with the world, we see things, we hear things, we say things — the world is much bigger than text. So to us, it always felt incomplete for text and code to be the single modalities, the single interfaces that we could have to how powerful these models are and what they can do."

GPT-4o mini will be available on Thursday to free users of ChatGPT, along with ChatGPT Plus