OPENAI is releasing a smarter version of its AI chatbot for free to users around the world – and it can see photos and even speak to you like a super-charged Siri.
The new GPT-4o model was announced at Spring Update, a special event live-streamed for free around the world.
It's being released on Monday and is expected to roll out over the next few weeks.
Regular ChatGPT runs on GPT 3.5, with an upgrade to the smarter GPT 4 requiring ChatGPT Plus, a paid-for subscription.
Now GPT-4o will be available on the ChatGPT app and website – and doesn't cost a penny.
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"The special thing about GPT-4o is that it brings GPT-4 level intelligence to everyone, including our free users," said Mira Murati, ChatGPT’s chief technology officer.
You can upload images and get feedback on those photos based on what the AI sees.
For instance, you could share a photo of a plant, a spider, or a landmark to find out more information about it.
Or you could ask it to translate the information on a photo of a foreign-language sign or menu.
You can even share a selfie with the app and ChatGPT will be able to describe the emotions it thinks you're feeling.
And it can remember things you've said before, even in different conversations.
ChatGPT can also use GPT-4o for voice conversations.
The Siri- or Alexa-style assistant will speak to you in natural language.
This sci-fi upgrade brings us closer to the movie Her, where humans can build what feel like close relationships with AI through actual spoken conversation.
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The app can also now function as a live translator between two people who speak different languages.
A live demo of this at the Spring Update event showed ChatGPT impressively translating English to Italian and vice versa.
AI REVOLUTION
OpenAI shot to international fame after releasing its ChatGPT chatbot at the end of 2022.
The AI helper kicked off an AI boom and has attracted over 100 million users.
OpenAI – led by CEO Sam Altman – is valued at more than $80 billion and sells a premium version of its chatbot called ChatGPT Plus to users.
The company is headquartered in San Francisco and has received billions of dollars in investment from Microsoft.
WHAT IS CHATGPT?
ChatGPT is a language model that can produce text.
So you feed it some kind of prompt – “Write a short poem about flowers,” for example – and it will create a chunk of text based on that.
If it works correctly, the text will read in natural language as if it was written by a human.
GPT stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer and describes the type of model that can create AI-generated content.
ChatGPT can hold conversations and even learn from things you’ve said.
It can handle very complicated prompts and is even being used by businesses to help with work.
But note that it might not always tell you the truth.
"These models were trained on vast amounts of data from the internet written by humans, including conversations, so the responses it provides may sound human-like," Open AI explained.
"It is important to keep in mind that this is a direct result of the system's design (i.e. maximizing the similarity between outputs and the dataset the models were trained on).
"And that such outputs may be inaccurate, untruthful, and otherwise misleading at times."
