OpenAI

GPT-4o is the highly anticipated and remarkable large language model (LLM) AI released by OpenAI, and it comes with a plethora of new features that are both free and available to paid users alike. It is a multimodal AI that enhances ChatGPT, offering faster responses, enhanced comprehension, and a host of new capabilities that are set to continue rolling out in the weeks to come.

• Availability and Price
• It’s Extremely Fast
• Advanced Voice Support
• Improved Comprehension
• Native macOS Desktop App
• Not Everything is Quite Ready Yet

With fierce competition emerging from Meta’s Llama 3 and Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s latest release is aiming to stay ahead in the game. Here’s why it’s such an exciting development.

Availability and Price

If you’ve been using the free version of ChatGPT for some time and have been enviously eyeing the features enjoyed by ChatGPT Plus users, there’s great news! Now, you too can have access to features like image detection, file uploads, finding custom GPTs in the GPT Store, utilizing Memory to retain your conversation so that you don’t have to repeat yourself, and analyzing data and performing complex calculations.

All of this is in addition to the enhanced intelligence of the standard GPT-4 model, which GPT-4o is an equivalent of, even though it was trained from scratch as a multimodal AI. The reason for this is that GPT-4o is computationally much cheaper to run, meaning it requires fewer tokens, making it more viable for a wider user base to enjoy.

However, free users will have a limited number of messages they can send to GPT-4o per day. Once that threshold is reached, you’ll be shifted to the GPT-3.5 model.

It’s Extremely Fast

OpenAI

GPT-4 differed from GPT-3.5 in several ways, and speed was one of them. GPT-4 was noticeably slower, even with its recent advancements and the introduction of GPT-4 Turbo. However, GPT-4o is almost instantaneous. This results in much swifter and more actionable text responses, and voice conversations occur in a much closer approximation to real-time.

While response speed might seem like a nice-to-have feature rather than a game-changing one, the fact that you can get responses in near real time makes GPT-4o a far more viable tool for tasks such as translation and providing conversational assistance.

Advanced Voice Support

Although initially, GPT-4o is only capable of working with text and images, it has been designed from the ground up to utilize voice commands and interact with users through audio. This means that instead of converting a voice into text, responding to that text, and then converting the text response into a voice output, GPT-4o can directly hear a voice and respond accordingly. With its improved speed, it can engage in more conversational responses and understand unique aspects of voice, such as tone, pace, mood, and more.

GPT-4o can laugh, be sarcastic, catch mistakes, and adjust in the middle of a conversation, and you can interrupt the conversation without it affecting its response. It can also understand different languages and translate on the fly, making it a useful real-time translation tool. It can even sing – or even have a duet with itself.

Two GPT-4os interacting and singing

This can be used for a variety of purposes, such as preparing for interviews, receiving singing coaching, running role-playing NPCs, telling dramatic bedtime stories with different voices and characters, creating voiced dialogue for a game project, telling jokes (and laughing in response to yours), and much more.

Improved Comprehension

GPT-4o understands you far better than its predecessors, especially when you communicate with it verbally. It can read tone and intention more accurately, and if you want it to be relaxed and friendly, it will engage in lighthearted banter to keep the conversation enjoyable.

When analyzing code or text, it takes your intentions into greater consideration, making it better at providing the response you desire and requiring less specific prompts. It is also better at understanding video and images, enabling it to have a deeper understanding of the world around it.

Live demo of GPT-4o vision capabilities

In several demonstrations, OpenAI showed users filming the room they were in, and the GPT-4o models then described it. In one video, the AI even described the room space to another version of itself, which then had its own responses based on that description.

Native macOS Desktop App

OpenAI

Native AI on Windows is currently limited to the rather restricted Copilot (for now), but macOS users will soon be able to fully utilize ChatGPT and its new GPT-4o model right from their desktop. With a new native desktop app, ChatGPT will be more accessible – and with a new user interface as well – making it easier to use than ever before.

The app will be available to most ChatGPT Plus users in the coming days and will be rolled out to free users in the coming weeks. A Windows version is promised for later this year.

Not Everything is Quite Ready Yet

At the time of writing, the only aspects of GPT-4o that are available to the public are the text and image modes. There is no advanced voice support, no real-time video comprehension, and the macOS desktop app won’t be available to everyone for at least a few more days.

But it is all on the way. These changes and other exciting upgrades for ChatGPT are just around the corner.