What's Different About OpenAI's Latest—and Free—ChatGPT
This week, OpenAI introduced its newest—and free—iteration: ChatGPT-4o. In a blog post, the company provided details of its latest flagship model, which can reason across vision, audio, and text in real time.
ChatGPT-4o (the "o" stands for "omni") seems to be the mysterious model tech enthusiasts were talking about just last week. Although its improvement in "intelligence" may not be as substantial as the leap was from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4, it comprises fascinating characteristics that set it apart from the previous model. In a post on X, Sam Altman emphasized that GPT-4o is "natively multimodal," meaning it can generate content as well as understand commands in voice, text, or images.
One of the major implications of GPT-4o is its inherent nature as a "walled garden," which the model release requires in order to meet the real-time functionality present across the "omni" in its moniker—it can “see,” “hear,” and “speak” to users all at once without any delays, in effect interacting with the world around it. As a result, it’s possible any third party (think: brand) data and embeddings may need to live within OpenAI’s servers.
But perhaps the most significant aspect of GPT-4o stems from OpenAI's business decision to grant everyone free access to the technology in the coming weeks. This comes alongside news that a MacOS desktop app will soon be available, allowing people to use ChatGPT outside the web and mobile applications. A version for Windows will be released later.
Unsurprisingly, OpenAI set a timely launch of GPT-4o not only to satisfy excitement over the more advanced GPT-5, but also to directly compete with Google’s I/O conference. Google highlighted product updates to Gemini as well as feature integrations of the GenAI model across its suite of services.
Why it matters: Artificial intelligence, in all its iterations, continues to inform and transform the digital landscape and our presence within it. With GPT-4o becoming free to the public, it also harkens a new era of democratized access to artificial intelligence, allowing consumers the opportunity to experiment and opening more doors for brands to launch AI-led initiatives that enhance audience experiences, drive innovation, and gain a competitive edge.
