OpenAI's May 13 spring update brought three major announcements from the AI company:
- A new flagship AI model called GPT-4o.
- A ChatGPT desktop application for macOS.
- ChatGPT users who do not pay a subscription can now access more features for free.
The upcoming changes to ChatGPT “bring GPT-4 level intelligence to everyone, including our free users,” OpenAI CTO Mira Murati said during the livestream.
GPT-4o improves the voice and video capabilities of GPT-4 Turbo
Murati said OpenAI's next flagship, GPT-4o, is “faster” and “improves its capabilities in text, vision and audio” compared to GPT-4. The “o” means “omni.”
Instead, GPT-4o responds faster than its predecessor GPT-4 Turbo and has increased its proficiency in non-English languages, video and audio. GPT-4o will be 2 times faster, 50% cheaper and will have speed limits 5 times higher than GPT-4 Turbo, Murati said. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said today on X that GPT-4o is “natively multimodal,” meaning it can switch faster between speech, text, and video analysis.
GPT-4o will be accessible for free within ChatGPT and will be rolled out over the next few weeks to users around the world. ChatGPT Plus and Team users will be able to use GPT-4o first, while availability for enterprise users “is coming soon,” Open AI said. ChatGPT paid users will have up to five times the capacity limits. GPT-4o will also be available in the ChatGPT API.
The demonstration of GPT-4o's voice capabilities in the ChatGPT app in the live stream sounded quite natural, including several examples of how the model will respond seamlessly when interrupted. ChatGPT sometimes had a hard time distinguishing which images it was supposed to be looking at, but its responsiveness was notable.
The company noted that it would not release GPT-5, the rumored next-generation model, during the spring update. Murati said there may be more news about upcoming releases “soon.”
Security considerations around GPT-4o
OpenAI assured people that GPT-4o has “new security systems to provide security barriers on voice outputs,” plus extensive post-training and filtering of training data to prevent ChatGPT from saying anything inappropriate or unsafe. . GPT-4o was built in accordance with OpenAI's internal readiness framework and voluntary commitments. More than 70 external security researchers formed a red team with GPT-4o before its release.
SEE: Organizations around the world adopt standards like Content Credentials to try to reduce misinformation and AI-created deepfakes. (Technological Republic)
New ChatGPT desktop app comes to macOS
MacOS users will soon be able to download a ChatGPT desktop app. ChatGPT Plus users can access the desktop app today, while other free and paid users can expect to gain access to it “in the coming weeks,” OpenAI said.
Updated UI
Simultaneously with the new ChatGPT desktop app, the ChatGPT apps and the desktop version will receive a new, cleaner user interface aimed at improving usability.
The GPT Store and other capabilities are now open to ChatGPT users for free
Starting May 13, ChatGPT users will see the following rollout for people who don't subscribe to paid plans:
- Use GPT-4 instead of GPT-3.5.
- GPT-4o can extract data from both the ChatGPT model and the web.
- ChatGPT can analyze data into charts and create new charts.
- ChatGPT can chat about photos uploaded by the user.
- Free tier users can upload text files that ChatGPT can then summarize, analyze, or create new content.
- Free tier users can explore and use GPT in the GPT Store.
- Free tier users can take advantage of ChatGPT's Memory feature, which allows the model to remember previous conversations with the same user.
TechRepublic covered the OpenAI spring update remotely.
