OpenAI announced its newest model, GPT-4o, can now be customized. The company said that the ability to fine-tune the multimodal GPT-4o has been “one of the most requested features from developers.” Customization can move the model toward more specific structure and tone of responses or allow it to follow specific instruction sets geared toward individual use cases. Developers can now implement custom datasets, aiming for better performance at a lower cost. The ChatGPT maker is rolling out the welcome mat by offering 1 million training tokens per day “for free for every organization” through September 23.

VentureBeat says the offer is extended only to developers who are on an OpenAI’s paid usage tier, though the company downplayed that aspect in the announcement. New sign-ups would qualify, and the move makes clear that beyond rewarding its existing customers the company is focusing on expanding its user base.

“The news comes less than a month after the company made it possible for developers to fine-tune the model’s smaller, faster, cheaper variant, GPT-4o mini — which is however, less powerful than the full GPT-4o” reports VentureBeat. The lightweight GPT-4o mini is geared toward mobile and on-device use and lacks the power of the full GPT-4o.

Developers interested in exploring the new GPT-4o capabilities are invited to “visit the fine-tuning dashboard, create an account or log in, then select gpt-4o-2024-08-06 from the base model drop-down.”

GPT-4o mini fine-tuning is also available to all developers on all paid usage tiers, and OpenAI is offering 2 million GPT-4o mini training tokens per day for free through September 23.

“Tokens refer to the numerical representations of letter combinations, numbers, and words that represent underlying concepts learned by an LLM or LMM,” notes VentureBeat, explaining that they’re a common unit of measurement for “how much information a model is ingesting (input) or providing (output).”

In order to fine-tune any large model — be it a large language model or large multimodal model — developers must tokenize their organizational or use-case data. Model builders who allow customization provide the tools to do that.

The free token offer comes at a time when “OpenAI faces steep competition in price from other proprietary providers such as Google and Anthropic, as well as from open-source models such as the newly unveiled Hermes 3,” a collaborative venture from Nous Research and Lambda, that is a fine-tuned version of Meta’s Llama 3.1, says VentureBeat.

“Many tech companies offer the ability to customize AI models big and small,” writes Bloomberg. “OpenAI is banking on making it easier for customers to tweak its most powerful model by working directly with the company, rather than using an outside service or a less powerful product, said Olivier Godement, the head of product for OpenAI’s API.”