OpenAI has launched a faster and cheaper version of the artificial intelligence, ChatGPT-4o, with a promise to make it available to all users for free.
The ChatGPT-4o, an updated version of ChatGPT-4, was unveiled during a livestreamed event on Monday. According to OpenAI, the new large language model trained on vast amounts of data from the internet will be better at handling text and audio and can work with 50 languages.
The company announced that while the text and image input started rolling out on Monday in API and ChatGPT, the voice and video features will be released in the coming weeks.
OpenAI’s announcement also comes the day before the Google I/O developer conference. Google, an early leader in the artificial intelligence (AI) space, is expected to use the event to unveil more AI updates after racing to keep pace with Microsoft Corp.-backed OpenAI.
AI in the hands of all
Commenting on the new product via post on his personal blog, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, said a key part of the company’s mission was to put AI tools in the hands of everyone for free or at a great price. But with ChatGPT-4o, Altman said the company is now making “the best model in the world available for free in ChatGPT, without ads or anything like that.”
“Our initial conception when we started OpenAI was that we’d create AI and use it to create all sorts of benefits for the world. Instead, it now looks like we’ll create AI and then other people will use it to create all sorts of amazing things that we all benefit from.
“We are a business and will find plenty of things to charge for, and that will help us provide free, outstanding AI service to (hopefully) billions of people,” Altman wrote.
“The new voice (and video) mode is the best compute interface I’ve ever used. It feels like AI from the movies; and it’s still a bit surprising to me that it’s real. Getting to human-level response times and expressiveness turns out to be a big change,” the OpenAI CEO added.
He noted that the original ChatGPT has shown a hint of what is possible with language interfaces as it “feels viscerally different, fast, smart, fun, natural, and helpful.”
According to Altman, talking to a computer has never felt really natural for him, but now it does.
“As we add (optional) personalization, access to your information, the ability to take actions on your behalf, and more, I can really see an exciting future where we are able to use computers to do much more than ever before,” Altman added.
More insights
OpenAI’s decision to make its latest model available for free may be a sign the company is de-emphasizing profit, though ChatGPT still has a paid version.
In March this year, billionaire Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAi and the company’s co-founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, for turning the company into a profit-making venture.
Musk, who co-founded and was one of the early backers of OpenAI, said the mission of the company is to be a non-profit that develops AI for the benefit of humanity.
The Tesla CEO claimed that Altman and Brockman convinced him to help found and bankroll the startup in 2015, with promises it would be a non-profit focused on countering the competitive threat from Google.
According to the lawsuit, the founding agreement required OpenAI to make its technology “freely available” to the public.
