OpenAI has announced the launch of GPT-4o, a new iteration of its GPT-4 model that powers ChatGPT. According to OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, who spoke during a live stream announcement, the updated model is “much faster” and enhances “capabilities across text, vision, and audio.” This latest version will be free for all users, and paid users will benefit from “up to five times the capacity limits” compared to free users.
In a detailed blog post, OpenAI described that GPT-4o’s capabilities will be introduced “iteratively” starting today, with special extended red team access. Initially, the rollout will focus on improvements in text and image processing within ChatGPT.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman elaborated on the features on X, noting that GPT-4o is “natively multimodal,” meaning it can generate and understand content in voice, text, or images. Developers interested in exploring this upgraded model will have access to an API that is half the price and twice as fast as the previous version, GPT-4-turbo.
Before the introduction of GPT-4o, there was speculation that OpenAI might unveil an AI search engine to compete with Google, a voice assistant called Perplexity, or a completely new model, GPT-5. However, these speculations were clarified with today’s announcement. OpenAI strategically scheduled the launch just before Google I/O, Google’s major annual conference, likely in anticipation of Google’s own AI innovations from their Gemini team.
