New ChatGPT-4o available for all users

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.

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 OpenAI boss added: “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.”