OpenAI on Monday released a new artificial intelligence model and a desktop version of ChatGPT, along with an updated user interface, the company’s latest effort to expand the use of its popular chatbot.
The update brings GPT-4 to everyone, including free OpenAI users, CTO Mira Murati said in a livestreamed event. He added that the new model, GPT-4o, is “much faster”, with improved text, video and audio capabilities. OpenAI said it eventually plans to allow users to video chat with ChatGPT.
“It’s the first time we’ve really taken a huge step forward in terms of ease of use,” Murati said.
OpenAI, with support Microsoft, has been valued at more than $80 billion by investors. The company, founded in 2015, is under pressure to stay at the top of the productive AI market while finding ways to make money as it spends huge sums on processors and infrastructure to build and train its models.
The o in GPT-4o stands for omni. The new model allows ChatGPT to handle 50 different languages with improved speed and quality, and will also be available through OpenAI’s API, so developers can start building apps using the new model today, Murati said.
He added that GPT-4o is twice as fast and half the cost of GPT-4 Turbo.
OpenAI team members demonstrated the audio capabilities of the new model, asking for help calming down before a public speech. OpenAI researcher Mark Chen said the model has the ability to “understand your emotions,” adding that the model can also handle users interrupting it. The team also asked her to analyze a user’s facial expression to comment on the emotions the person might be experiencing.
“Hey, what’s up? How can I brighten your day today?” ChatGPT’s sound function said when the user greeted him.
The company plans to test the voice feature in the coming weeks, with early access for paid ChatGPT Plus subscribers, according to suspension. OpenAI also said the new model can respond to users’ audio prompts “in just 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds, which is similar to a human’s response time in a conversation.”
Chen demonstrated the model’s ability to tell a bedtime story and asked him to change the tone of his voice to be more dramatic or robotic. He even asked him to sing the story.
OpenAI’s new model can also act as a translator, even in audio mode, the company said. Chen demonstrated the tool’s ability to listen to Murati speak Italian while he was speaking English and translate into their respective languages as they conversed.
Team members also demonstrated the model’s ability to solve mathematical equations and help write code, positioning it as a stronger competitor to Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot.
For OpenAI, it’s one of the company’s biggest announcements since the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise in August, its enterprise-grade AI chatbot. That tool had been in development for “less than a year” and had the help of more than 20 companies of different sizes and industries, OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap told CNBC at the time.
OpenAI, Microsoft and Google are at the helm of a generative AI gold rush as companies in seemingly every industry scramble to add chatbots and AI agents to core services to keep up with competitors. Earlier this month, OpenAI competitor Anthropic announced its first enterprise offering and a free iPhone app.
A record $29.1 billion was invested in nearly 700 productive AI deals in 2023, up more than 260% from the previous year, according to PitchBook. The market is expected to a maximum of $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.
Some in the industry have raised concerns about the speed with which untested new services come to market, and academics and ethicists worry about the technology’s tendency to spread bias.
After ChatGPT launched in November 2022, it broke records at the time as the fastest growing consumer app in history and now has around 100 million weekly active users. OpenAI says more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies use the platform.
Murati said during Monday’s event that OpenAI wants to “take some of the mystique out of the technology.”
“In the coming weeks, we will be rolling out these capabilities to everyone,” Murati said.
The new model will first roll out on Tuesday to ChatGPT Plus and Team customers, and then to Enterprise later. suspension he said on Monday. It will also be available to free ChatGPT users from Monday, with usage limits. ChatGPT Plus users will have five times the message capacity of free users, and ChatGPT Team and Enterprise customers will have even larger usage limits.
Murati concluded the event with a live stream by thanking Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and his company for providing the necessary graphics processing units (GPUs) to power OpenAI’s technology.
“I just want to thank the incredible team at OpenAI and also thank Jensen and the team at Nvidia for bringing us the most advanced GPUs to make this demo possible today,” he said.
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