On Monday, OpenAI announced its modern flagship ChatGPT-4o, an AI chatbot that sees, hears and converses in real time.
The company in its announcement said that ChatGPT-4o is 50% cheaper and twice as rapid as GPT-4 turbo. This makes the modern model available to all users, providing “GPT 4 intelligence” to free clients. Paid users will still have up to five times the capacity limits.
“We’ve been really focused on improving the intelligence of these models over the last few years, and they’ve done quite well,” said Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer. “But for the first time, we are really taking a huge step forward in terms of ease of apply.”
Mark Chen, OpenAI’s head of pioneering research, showed how the modern model could listen to his breathing and show him how to take deeper breaths. Fellow researcher Barret Zoph demonstrated ChatGPT-4o’s vision capabilities. Like a math teacher, a chatbot can look through a phone’s camera lens or see a computer screen and aid users solve a math problem in real time. It can look at users’ faces through the selfie camera and analyze their mood based on their facial expressions. Users can also ask ChatGPT-4o to tell them bedtime stories in different voices and translate conversations.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had been outspoken in his criticism of the company’s latest model ahead of today’s announcement. In March he he said it GPT-4 was nowhere near his standards. “I think it kind of sucks,” Altman said when asked about GPT-4 in a podcast interview with computer scientist Lex Fridman.
“I think our job is to live a few years in the future and remember that the tools we have now will be useless when we look back at them, and that’s how we make sure the future is better,” he added.
But ChatGPT-4o “seems like magic to me,” Altman said of the modern model in a Friday post on X while waiting for its reveal.
Mass media he speculated that there would be a modern AI-powered search engine on the market to compete with Google, but Altman clarified that the launch would not include a search engine. “Not gpt-5, not a search engine, but we’ve been working strenuous on some modern things that we think people will love!” Altman wrote in the post.
