ChatGPT will soon become a Siri-killing personal assistant. OpenAI has announced the GPT-4o model, its newest LLM, set to launch iteratively over the next few weeks. GPT-4o provides GPT-4 power refined to be much easier to use – much greater speeds and user-friendly features are the model's focus – culminating in ChatGPT’s transformation into a class-leading personal assistant. The update will be released for all users of ChatGPT, paid and free, starting today.
GPT-4o will enable ChatGPT to become a legitimate Siri competitor, with real-time conversations via voice that are responded to instantly without lag time. ChatGPT also gains a new "Vision" tool alongside the conversation tool that allows it instant visual input that it can respond to in real-time, with use cases demonstrated including helping with math homework and evaluating facial emotion. The tool will also gain "Memory," a mode allowing it greater access to past queries for smoother conversation. ChatGPT’s new real-time responses make tools like Siri and Echo seem lethargic. And although ChatGPT likely won’t be able to schedule your haircuts like Google Assistant can, it did put up admirable real-time translating chops to challenge Google.
ChatGPT will also become much more accessible, releasing a new desktop client for Mac (a potential Windows/Linux release is yet unknown; paid users will see the Mac app before free users). The mobile app and web interface are also gaining smooth new UI upgrades to make ChatGPT as easy to use as possible, a stated part of OpenAI's mission statement. With this increased accessibility, GPT-4o was engineered to be fully featured in 50 languages, covering 97% of internet users, according to OpenAI. Security has also been beefed up with the service's increased visual and audio capabilities, though specifics on how security was increased were left out of the conference.
Another major shift is ChatGPT’s increasing support of free users. The GPT-4o will be open to free users without the paywall that some flagship GPT models have had in the past, will open up the GPT store to free users, and will remove all other restrictions. Paid users now only get increased rate limits compared to free users, and early access to the MacOS desktop app. ChatGPT risks alienating its current paid userbase but stands to gain from a free userbase that has now swelled beyond 100 million users.
The GPT-4o update and text and image input will begin rolling out today to the API and users, with voice and video to come soon, per OpenAI’s Twitter. Early reports believed the announcement livestream would focus on OpenAI’s attempts to create an AI-powered search engine, but no such features were outlined. The heavy Apple product placement at the press release and other factors in the past weeks have contributed to a pervasive rumor that OpenAI and Apple are set to announce a partnership at WWDC in June. However, nothing in the update video pointed to this. Nvidia did see a namedrop; however, Jensen Huang was thanked for donating the DGX H200 computer in April, which powered the demo.
