OpenAI today announced a cut-price "mini" model that it says will allow more companies and programs to tap into its artificial intelligence. The new model, called GPT-4o mini and available starting today, is 60 percent cheaper than OpenAI's most inexpensive existing model while offering higher performance, the company says. OpenAI characterizes the move as part of an effort to make AI "as broadly accessible as possible," but it also reflects growing competition among AI cloud providers as well as rising interest in small and free open source AI models. Meta is expected to debut the largest version of its very capable free offering, Llama 3, next week. "The whole point of OpenAI is to build and distribute AI safely and make it broadly accessible," Olivier Godement, a product manager at OpenAI responsible for the new model, tells WIRED.

On Thursday morning, Meta released its latest artificial intelligence model, Llama 3, touting it as the most powerful to be made open source so that anyone can use it. The same afternoon, Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, said an even more powerful successor to Llama is in the works. He suggested it could potentially outshine the world's best closed AI models, including OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini. Meta released two versions of Llama 3 today, one with 8 billion parameters--an industry term that roughly conveys a model's power--and another with 70 billion parameters. LeCun said that bigger models are in the works and that the most powerful, with more than 400 billion parameters, is currently in training.