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TechCrunch Minute: Everything you need to know about OpenAI’s new GPT-4o model

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If you’ve been following the news around OpenAI, you’ve probably seen reports that the company is working on a search product that was going to be announced this week. That didn’t happen, but instead it revealed something arguably more impressive — it launched its latest model, GPT-4o.

The “o” stands for “omni,” alluding to the fact that the model can handle speech, text and video. Speech is the big addition to GPT-4o and to the popular chatbot it powers, ChatGPT. Where ChatGPT previously supported voice interactions through text-to-speech, it’s now closer to a real human assistant, with capabilities like detecting the user’s emotion and responding with emotion of its own. It can even sing.

On top of that, GPT-4o also has improved vision, for example being able to analyze a photo to identify an item of clothing or a desktop screen to analyze software code.

In a variety of new video demos, GPT-4o users show off different capabilities, such as tutoring a student on math, complimenting a dad joke, providing guidance to a user whose vision is impaired and even chatting with other versions of itself, GPT-4o to GPT-4o. And unlike some other OpenAI announcements, where there’s extremely limited access to the new technology, GPT-4o is available in the free tier of ChatGPT today.

Hit play, then let us know if you’re excited!

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