ChatGPT-4o announced from OpenAI, will be freely available for everyone

During OpenAI's Spring Update streaming event, the AI startup announced its next large language model (LLM), which the company calls ChatGPT-4o.

During the presentation, OpenAI's chief technology officer, Mira Murati, stated that the company wanted to expand the reach of its ChatGPT-4 LLM. The release of ChatGPT-4o will allow that to happen by being available for everyone, even free users. This was confirmed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a post on X (formerly Twitter):

it is available to all ChatGPT users, including on the free plan! so far, GPT-4 class models have only been available to people who pay a monthly subscription. this is important to our mission; we want to put great AI tools in the hands of everyone.
— Sam Altman (@sama) May 13, 2024

During a live demo, OpenAI team members chatted with ChatGPT-4o with natural voice commands. The AI voice could change its inflection with just a few voice suggestions from the humans on stage, including changing tones so that the voice is more dramatic or even changing into a robotic-like voice.

In another demo, ChatGPT-4o was shown a written math equation via a smartphone camera, and the AI voice was able to describe the equation and much more. Altman posted on his X account that ChatGPT-4o will begin to roll out sometime in the next few weeks.

In a post on the OpenAI blog, there's more info on what's included with the new ChatGPT-4o model:

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. It matches GPT-4 Turbo performance on text in English and code, with significant improvement on text in non-English languages, while also being much faster and 50% cheaper in the API. GPT-4o is especially better at vision and audio understanding compared to existing models.

Microsoft is a major technology investor and partner with OpenAI, and it frequently adds OpenAI's new models to its own AI services. At the time of this writing, there's no word on when ChatGPT-4o will be added to Microsoft's AI products.

OpenAI also revealed that its GPT Store, where people can offer custom chatbots for specific tasks, is now available for every ChatGPT user to access.