By Laura Bratton
SAN FRANCISCO, USA - OpenAI on Monday announced its new flagship model ChatGPT-4o — an AI chatbot that can see, hear, and have real-time conversations.
The company said in its announcement that ChatGPT-4o is 50% cheaper and twice as fast as GPT-4 turbo. It’s making the new model available to all users, bringing “GPT 4 class intelligence” to free customers. Paid users will still have up to five times the capacity limits.
“For the past couple of years, we’ve been very focused on improving the intelligence of these models, and they’ve gotten pretty good,” said OpenAI technology chief Mira Murati. “But this is the first time that we are really making a huge step forward when it comes to the ease of use.”
OpenAI’s head of frontiers research Mark Chen showed how the new model could listen to his breathing and walk him through how to take deeper breaths. Fellow researcher Barret Zoph showed off ChatGPT-4o’s vision capabilities. Just like a math teacher, the chatbot can look through a phone’s camera lens or see a computer screen and help users solve a math problem in real time. It can look at users’ faces through a selfie camera and analyze their mood from their facial expressions. Users can also ask ChatGPT-4o to tell them bedtime stories in different voices and translate conversations.
OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has been transparent about his critiques of the company’s most recent model before today’s announcement. In March, he said that GPT-4 wasn’t 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 it is our job to live a few years in the future and remember that the tools we have now are going to kind of suck, looking backward at them, and that’s how we make sure the future is better,” he added.
But ChatGPT-4o “feels like magic to me,” Altman said of the new model in an X post on Friday in anticipation of its reveal.
Media outlets had speculated that the launch would be a new AI-powered search product to rival Google, but Altman clarified that the release would not include a search engine. “Not gpt-5, not a search engine, but we’ve been hard at work on some new stuff we think people will love!” Altman wrote in the post.
