GPT-4o: OpenAI Unveil Faster, Voice-Focused AI Model

Bukola Olanrewaju May 15, 2024 TECHNOLOGY Leave a comment

OpenAI has launched its new Artificial Intelligence model and desktop version of ChatGPT, GPT-4o with more powerful abilities, including smarter, faster real-time voice interactions.

It’s called GPT-4o, and it will be rolled out to all users of ChatGPT, including non-subscribers.

Mira Murati, technology chief, said in a live-streamed event on Monday that the new update will bring GPT-4o to everyone, including free users.

She noted that the new model, GPT-4o, is much faster with improved capabilities in text, video, and audio. OpenAI also revealed that it plans to allow users to video chat with ChatGPT.

It is faster than earlier models and has been programmed to sound chatty and sometimes even flirtatious in its responses to prompts.

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The new version can read and discuss images, translate languages, and identify emotions from visual expressions. There is also memory so it can recall previous prompts.

The o in GPT-4o stands for omni, referring to the model’s ability to handle text, speech, and video. Over the next few weeks, it will be rolled out across the company’s developer and consumer-facing products.

The GPT-4o will improve the experience in OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT. While the platform has long offered a voice mode that transcribes the chatbot’s responses using a text-to-speech model, the new GPT-4o will allow users to interact with ChatGPT more like an assistant.

Murati, the technology chief, noted that GPT-4o provides ‘GPT-4-level’ intelligence but improves GPT-4’s capabilities across multiple modalities and media. This new model allows ChatGPT to handle 50 languages with improved speed and quality.

“GPT-4o reasons across voice, text, and vision. And this is incredibly important because we’re looking at the future of interaction between ourselves and machines,” Murati said.

It also upgrades ChatGPT’s vision capabilities. When given a photo or a desktop screen, ChatGPT will answer questions such as “What’s going on in this software code?” and “What brand of shirt is this person wearing?”

Murati said the model will also evolve further in the future.

“We know that these models are getting more and more complex, but we want the experience of interaction to actually become more natural and easy, and for you not to focus on the UI at all but just focus on the collaboration with ChatGPT,” Murati stated.

Speaking further, OpenAI noted GPT-4o is a step towards much more natural human-computer interaction—it accepts as input any combination of text, audio, image, and video and generates any combination of text, audio, and image outputs. It can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds, which is similar to human response time(opens in a new window) in a conversation. It matches GPT-4 Turbo performance on text in English and code, with significant improvement on text in non-English languages, while also being much faster and 50% cheaper in the API. GPT-4o is especially better at vision and audio understanding compared to existing models”, the company noted.