Why OpenAI's GPT-4o Announcement Is a Bigger Deal Than People Think

Author

Nathaniel Whittemore
May 14, 2024

The AI Daily Brief First Five - Tuesday May 14, 2024

Editor’s Note: We’re doing a slightly different format today as we reflect on yesterday’s announcement. Use the poll below to let us know how you liked it.

This is the most divisive OpenAI announcement event we've ever seen.

Some feel like they've glimpsed the future; Samantha from Her or Jarvis from Iron Man brought to life. Others are left saying "that's it?"

Part of this is about what this wasn't: it wasn't an announcement about GPT4.5 or GPT-5. There is so much attention on the state of the art horserace that for some, anything less than that was going to be a disappointment no matter what.

What this was, ultimately, was a product announcement. OpenAI is betting on a totally new mode of interacting with AI. The breakout experience was the chatbot of ChatGPT, but this announcement shows that their bet on the future of human-AI interactions is actually chatting with voice and vision.

Product announcements are going to inherently be more divisive than technology announcements because it's harder to tell if a product is going to be truly different until you actually interact with it. And especially when it comes to a different mode of human-computer interaction, there is even more room for diverse beliefs about how useful it's going to be.

That said, the fact that there wasn't a GPT4.5 or GPT5 announced is also distracting people from the technological advancement that this is a natively multimodal model. It's not a text model with a voice or image addition; it is multimodal token in, multimodal token out. This opens up a huge array of use cases that are going to take some time to filter into the consciousness.

Lastly, and most practically, it's hugely significant that they've made this model available for free to everyone, as well as making the API 50% cheaper. That is a MASSIVE increase in accessibility.

Top 3 things from the announcement:

3 - Truly natively multimodal model - this will likely transform use cases for ChatGPT as much or more as increasing the intelligence of the underlying model

2 - Free access to their most advance model - huge transformation in accessibility

1 - OpenAI's big bet on a new mode of interaction - OpenAI's like they're making a huge bet that Her-style interactions will replace typing to chatbots as the way we interact with AI

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