Newsletter
OpenAI just held its spring live event, and the company delivered on its promise to announce new innovations for ChatGPT and GPT-4. The 26-minute event didn’t announce too many updates, but it did show off something pretty significant that the company has been working on. So, here’s a rundown of the announcements that OpenAI made during its spring event.
Unfortunately, there are a few announcements that we were looking forward to, but the company did not mention them. We’ve been covering news about a potential OpenAI search engine that the company is allegedly working on. We heard nothing about that during the event. Also, we heard nothing about the GPT-5 model.
Be that as it may, if you are a person who uses OpenAI’s AI products, then the announcements made today should satisfy you.
Everything that OpenAI announced during its spring event
OpenAI definitely made some pretty notable announcements today. However, let’s start off with some of the smaller announcements that the company made.
Numbers
During the event, OpenAI’s Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati mentioned that ChatGPT is used by over 100 million users. This is a metric that we received in the past, but it appears that the company is keeping its trajectory and user base.
Also, she mentioned that there are now over a million GPTs in the GPT store. If you don’t know what they are, they are like separate user-created versions of ChatGPT that can be used for specific uses. Only people who are subscribed to a paid ChatGPT tier can access the GPT store. So, if you are a paid customer, you have your choice of over a million GPTs to use.
Lastly, ChatGPT now supports more than 50 languages. This makes it an incredibly useful tool internationally. Languages include English, Croatian, Chinese, Bulgarian, Georgian, German, Greek, Hindi, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Mongolian, Polish, Slavic, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, and many more.
GPT UI revamp
Next up, is a new revamped ChatGPT interface. It’s not extremely different from what we’re used to. However, it does show a nice change of pace.
When you open the website, you will see a new home screen that’s more inviting and conversational. You will see suggestions of queries that you can input.
Another neat addition is the almost chat app-like interface. After you type in a query, you will see the text you typed show up in what looks like a chat bubble. This is in contrast to having the text set against the background. It’s a slight update, but it still looks nice.
Mac app
A pretty significant bit of news was the announcement of a standalone ChatGPT app for Mac computers. The staff didn’t speak too much about the application, but we saw some of it during a showcase of ChatGPT’s abilities.
The aim of the app is to streamline the ChatGPT experience. It has a very intuitive user interface that’s reminiscent of what users have become accustomed to. The interface itself is pretty minimalist. While you can use it as you would the website, the main point of the ChatGPT application is to basically act as an assistant. Rather than going into the application itself and typing in your queries, the application will integrate itself with your software so you’ll be able to quickly access it when you need it.
Using the application
For example, if you’re typing a document on Google Docs, and you need ChatGPT for help, you can simply press the Option + Space shortcut to summon the floating ChatGPT text bar. Simply type wherever you want into the text field, and you will see the application quickly serve up your response.
However, you will gain access to more functionality by clicking on the Attachment button. When you click on it, you will see a drop-down menu appear with additional options. These options allow you to upload a photo, upload a file, take a screenshot, take a photo using the device’s camera, or open the app.
When you choose to attach a file or image, you will see the image inside of the text field. Once you type your query, you will see the full app open up with your response. After that, you’ll interact with ChatGPT as you would on the website.
During the event, we saw that one of the users was able to simply use the Command + C shortcut to copy text directly into ChatGPT. This negates your having to paste it into ChatGPT.
Voice/Vision
The Mac application also gives ChatGPT eyes and ears. This functionality is still rolling out to users, so it may be a bit of time before you see it. However, you will see the microphone icon when ChatGPT appears. When you do that, you will be able to speak directly to it. You will also get real-time audio feedback. So, it will feel just like you’re speaking to ChatGPT. It will be extremely fluid due to a certain reason that we will discuss later in this article.
Along with that, ChatGPT will also be able to see what is on your screen. So, if you have a document or a picture on your screen, the application will be able to ascertain what is on it and give you information based on it.
Availability
The ChatGPT Mac application is currently available to download. It’s currently only available for paid ChatGPT users. However, if you are a free user, don’t fret. The application will be coming out to you over the coming weeks.
Unfortunately, Windows users will have to wait a bit longer. The company stated that it will release a Windows application, but it will not be until later this year. So, it may be a few more months before the application makes it over to you guys.
GPT-4o
The biggest announcement during the event was OpenAI’s new model GPT-4o. Folks waiting for GPT-5 will be a bit disappointed, but this model offers enough of an upgrade to keep them satisfied for a bit.
Murati did mention that this is OpenAI’s next flagship model. So, you can expect the very best that OpenAI has to offer with this model. With GPT-4o, you get a slew of improvements to intelligence, speed, and usability. One of the main ways that GPT-4 improves over GPT-4 Turbo is in speed. In fact, GPT-4o is up to twice as fast as GPT-4 Turbo. Also, it is 50% cheaper and it has a five times higher rate limit.
That’s impressive on paper, but the OpenAI development team showcased some of GPT-4o’s capabilities in real time. The team showed off GPT-4o’s voice capabilities, and it was able to give vocal feedback extremely quickly. It was almost as if they were speaking to an actual human being.
Voice
Speaking of the voice feature, it can give responses very quickly. However, you can also interrupt it during a response and offer edits to your query. The dev team that showcased the voice capabilities spoke to it in a very natural tone. So, you’re able to speak to it as if you’re speaking to a person right beside you. The vocal responses sound extremely realistic, albeit with some weird audio artifacts. However, this is all being generated in real-time.
The team was able to give an example of the wide range of emotions that ChatGPT can convey by telling it to speak in different tones. They told it to tell a story, and they suggested that ChatGPT speak with a more dramatic voice; it acquiesced. Then, when they told ChatGPT to speak with even more drama, it did so. Lastly, when the team told ChatGPT to speak in a robotic voice, it also did so.
Translation
ChatGPT can function as a real-time translator as well. rather than just giving it a command to translate language A into language B, you can give a very human response like “ChatGPT, I’m in Italy, and I want you to translate everything Italian into English and everything English into Italian.”
For this example, Murati asked a question in Italian, and ChatGPT translated it. ChatGPT’s responses were very human. Rather than giving a direct word-for-word translation, ChatGPT actually gave a very natural-sounding summary of what she said.
Vision
One of the more impressive aspects of GPT-4o is the vision capability. Using the camera in the ChatGPT app, it is able to ascertain what it’s looking at in the viewfinder in real time. For example, if you’re having issues with a math problem, you can point the camera at it, and ChatGPT will be able to help you through it.
In a very impressive showcase of its capabilities, ChatGPT was able to ascertain the emotion of a person’s face.
Availability
Free ChatGPT users don’t have to feel left out this time. GPT-4o will be available to both free and paid users. This is great news to hear from people who use ChatGPT for free. They will be able to try out these new features without needing to shell out money each month.
However, this will be a gradual rollout. So, these features will be coming out over the next couple of weeks. We’re certain that paid users will be getting features first with free users following.
All in all, while this was not the biggest announcement, OpenAI was still able to introduce us to some neat additions to ChatGPT.