It’s nothing new for computers to mimic human social etiquette, emotion, or humor. We just aren’t used to them doing it very well. OpenAI’s presentation of an all-new version of ChatGPT on Monday suggests that’s about to change. It’s built around an updated AI model called GPT-4o, which OpenAI says is better able to make sense of visual and auditory input, describing it as “multimodal.
Many people are already spending lots of time with chatbot companions or AI girlfriends, and the technology looks set to get a lot more engaging. When I spoke with Demis Hassabis, the executive leading Google’s AI charge, ahead of Google’s event, he said the research paper was inspired by the possibilities raised by Project Astra. “We need to get ahead of all this given the tech that we're building,' he said. After Monday’s news from OpenAI that rings truer than ever.