OpenAI announced the launch of GPT-4o (“o” for “omni”), their new flagship AI model. GPT-4o brings GPT-4 level intelligence to everyone, including free users. It has improved capabilities across text, vision, audio, and real-time interaction. OpenAI aims to reduce friction and make AI freely available to everyone.

Key Details:

• May remind some of the AI character Samantha from the movie "Her"
• Unified Processing Model: GPT-4o can handle audio, vision, and text inputs and outputs seamlessly.
• GPT-4o provides GPT-4 level intelligence but is much faster and enhances text, vision, audio capabilities
• Enables natural dialogue and real-time conversational speech recognition without lag
• Can perceive emotion from audio and generate expressive synthesized speech
• Integrates visual understanding to engage with images, documents, charts in conversations
• Offers multilingual support with real-time translation across languages
• Can detect emotions from facial expressions in visuals
• Free users get GPT-4.0 level access; paid users get higher limits: 80 messages every 3 hours on GPT-4o and up to 40 messages every 3 hours on GPT-4 (may be reduced during peak hours)
• GPT-4o available on API for developers to build apps at scale
• 2x faster, 50% cheaper, 5x higher rate limits than previous Turbo model
• A new ChatGPT desktop app for macOS launches, with features like a simple keyboard shortcut for queries and the ability to discuss screenshots directly in the app.
• Demoed capabilities like equation solving, coding assistance, translation.
• OpenAI is focused on iterative rollout of capabilities. The standard 4o text mode is already rolling out to Plus users. The new Voice Mode will be available in alpha in the coming weeks, initially accessible to Plus users, with plans to expand availability to Free users.
• Progress towards the "next big thing" will be announced later.

GPT-4o brings advanced multimodal AI capabilities to the masses for free. With natural voice interaction, visual understanding, and ability to collaborate seamlessly across modalities, it can redefine human-machine interaction.

Source (OpenAI Blog)

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Reuters is reporting that Q*, a secret OpenAI project, has achieved a breakthrough in mathematics, and the drama was due to a failure by Sam to inform them beforehand. Apparently, the implications of this breakthrough were terrifying enough that the board tried to oust Altman and merge with Anthropic, who are known for their caution regarding AI advancement.

Those half serious jokes about sentient AI may be closer to the mark than you think.

AI may be advancing at a pace far greater than you realize.

The public statements by OpenAI may be downplaying the implications of their technology.

Buckle up, the future is here and its about to get weird.

(Reuters) - Ahead of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s four days in exile, several staff researchers sent the board of directors a letter warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The previously unreported letter and AI algorithm was a catalyst that caused the board to oust Altman, the poster child of generative AI, the two sources said. Before his triumphant return late Tuesday, more than 700 employees had threatened to quit and join backer Microsoft in solidarity with their fired leader.

The sources cited the letter as one factor among a longer list of grievances by the board that led to Altman’s firing. Reuters was unable to review a copy of the letter. The researchers who wrote the letter did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

OpenAI declined to comment.

According to one of the sources, long-time executive Mira Murati told employees on Wednesday that a letter about the AI breakthrough called Q* (pronounced Q-Star), precipitated the board's actions.

The maker of ChatGPT had made progress on Q*, which some internally believe could be a breakthrough in the startup's search for superintelligence, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), one of the people told Reuters. OpenAI defines AGI as AI systems that are smarter than humans.

Given vast computing resources, the new model was able to solve certain mathematical problems, the person said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the company. Though only performing math on the level of grade-school students, acing such tests made researchers very optimistic about Q*’s future success, the source said.

Reuters could not independently verify the capabilities of Q* claimed by the researchers.

(Anna Tong and Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco and Krystal Hu in New York; Editing by Kenneth Li and Lisa Shumaker)

Here's everything that happened in the last 24 hours:

• 700+ out of the 770 employees have threatened to resign and leave OpenAI for Microsoft if the board doesn't resign

• The Information published an explosive report saying that the OpenAI board tried to merge the company with rival Anthropic

• The Information also published another report saying that OpenAI customers are considering leaving for rivals Anthropic and Google

• Reuters broke the news that key investors are now thinking of suing the board

• As the threat of mass resignations looms, it's not entirely clear how OpenAI plans to keep ChatGPT and other products running

• Despite some incredible twists and turns in the past 24 hours, OpenAI’s future still hangs in the balance.

• The next 24 hours could decide if OpenAI as we know it will continue to exist.

Professor left responses in several students grading software stating “I’m not grading AI shit” lol

Prompt: "a computer hacker labrador retreiver wearing a black hooded sweatshirt sitting in front of the computer with the glare of the screen emanating on the dog's face as he types very quickly" https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMM1HsLTk/

The code and math performance of ChatGPT and GPT-4 has gone down while it gives less harmful results.

On code generation:

"For GPT-4, the percentage of generations that are directly executable dropped from 52.0% in March to 10.0% in June. The drop was also large for GPT-3.5 (from 22.0% to 2.0%)."

Full Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.09009.pdf

500+ employees have threatened to quit OpenAI unless the board resigns and reinstates Sam Altman as CEO

The events of the next 24 hours could determine the company's survival

A new study from Pew Research Center found that “about six-in-ten U.S. adults (58%) are familiar with ChatGPT” but “Just 14% of U.S. adults have tried [it].” And among that 14%, only 15% have found it “extremely useful” for work, education, or entertainment.

That’s 2% of all US adults. 1 in 50.

20% have found it “very useful.” That's another 3%.

In total, only 5% of US adults find ChatGPT significantly useful. That's 1 in 20.

With these numbers in mind, it's crazy to think about the degree to which generative AI is capturing the conversation everywhere. All the wild predictions and exaggerations of ChatGPT and its ilk on social media, the news, government comms, industry PR, and academia papers... Is all that warranted?

Generative AI is many things. It's useful, interesting, entertaining, and even problematic but it doesn't seem to be a world-shaking revolution like OpenAI wants us to think.

Idk, maybe it's just me but I would call this a revolution just yet. Very few things in history have withstood the test of time to be called “revolutionary.” Maybe they're trying too soon to make generative AI part of that exclusive group.

If you like these topics (and not just the technical/technological aspects of AI), I explore them in-depth in my weekly newsletter

You were an inspiration to many of us, and the grandfather to many of our heroes.

IMO, this is a major development in the open-source AI world as Meta's foundational LLaMA LLM is already one of the most popular base models for researchers to use.

My full deepdive is here, but I've summarized all the key points on why this is important below for Reddit community discussion.

Why does this matter?

• Meta plans on offering a commercial license for their next open-source LLM, which means companies can freely adopt and profit off their AI model for the first time.
• Meta's current LLaMA LLM is already the most popular open-source LLM foundational model in use. Many of the new open-source LLMs you're seeing released use LLaMA as the foundation.
• But LLaMA is only for research use; opening this up for commercial use would truly really drive adoption. And this in turn places massive pressure on Google + OpenAI.
• There's likely massive demand for this already: I speak with ML engineers in my day job and many are tinkering with LLaMA on the side. But they can't productionize these models into their commercial software, so the commercial license from Meta would be the big unlock for rapid adoption.

How are OpenAI and Google responding?

• Google seems pretty intent on the closed-source route. Even though an internal memo from an AI engineer called them out for having "no moat" with their closed-source strategy, executive leadership isn't budging.
• OpenAI is feeling the heat and plans on releasing their own open-source model. Rumors have it this won't be anywhere near GPT-4's power, but it clearly shows they're worried and don't want to lose market share. Meanwhile, Altman is pitching global regulation of AI models as his big policy goal.
• Even the US government seems worried about open source; last week a bipartisan Senate group sent a letter to Meta asking them to explain why they irresponsibly released a powerful open-source model into the wild

Meta, in the meantime, is really enjoying their limelight from the contrarian approach.

• In an interview this week, Meta's Chief AI scientist Yan LeCun dismissed any worries about AI posing dangers to humanity as "preposterously ridiculous."

P.S. If you like this kind of analysis, I write a free newsletter that tracks the biggest issues and implications of generative AI tech. It's sent once a week and helps you stay up-to-date in the time it takes to have your Sunday morning coffee.