How to Do More with Less

12The Future of Relationships

When OpenAI released its new model, GPT-4o (“o” for “omni”), this is what their website showed as an update to the previous generation ChatGPT 4:

“GPT-4o (“o” for “omni”) is a step toward much more natural human-computer interaction, it accepts as input any combination of text, audio, image, and video and generates any combination of text, audio, and image outputs. It can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds, which is similar to human response time (opens in a new window) in a conversation.”

In my view there were a few major differences between this version and the previous that made it successfully break into the companion app territory:

1. It responds much faster than the previous version
2. It's becoming more like a Siri but can also see things
3. We will see the mode of using it change, from largely typing to ChatGPT to talking to ChatGPT
4. It feels like talking to someone on Zoom when the other person doesn't want to turn on their camera; ha!

For me, this was when I had chills. The model was revolutionary.

I'm sure I wasn't the only one who was alarmed by the flirtiness of the new ChatGPT voice in the demos OpenAI launched at that time. These demos cater to a male-heavy audience, and hence needed it for the clicks and watch-through rates, which explains the usage of the type of voice used for ChatGPT. But I also imagine I'm not alone when I was eerily reminded of the character, Samantha, ...