Did OpenAI just launch a Siri killer?

By Therese Poletti

OpenAI's latest update to its AI model, ChatGPT, has the potential - if it works as demonstrated - to be a Siri killer.

Monday's unveiling of ChatGPT-4o (the o stands for omni) did not include a search engine to rival Google, as a few news organizations had reported in the past couple of weeks. Instead, privately held OpenAI demonstrated the latest update of its artificial-intelligence model, ChatGPT-4, with an eerily human voice and attitude, immediately sparking many comparisons with the movie "Her," in which a user falls in love with his computer's AI.

"The new voice (and video) mode is the best computer interface I've ever used," OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said in a blog post. "It feels like AI from the movies; and it's still a bit surprising to me that it's real. Getting to human-level response times and expressiveness turns out to be a big change." OpenAI said its 4o can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds, similar to human response time in a conversation.

OpenAI, which counts Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) as its biggest investor, said its text and voice capabilities are starting to roll out starting today on the free version of ChatGPT. The demonstration that was streamed Monday from its San Francisco offices included a demo with its chief technology officer, Mira Murati, and two OpenAI researchers doing a live translation from Italian to English and English to Italian.

The news also came amid another big rumor involving OpenAI. Bloomberg reported last week that Apple Inc. is close to a deal to use ChatGPT on iOS 18, its upcoming next-generation iPhone operating system. Apple (AAPL) is widely expected to make some announcements in June at its Worldwide Developers Conference about AI. It was not clear if that announcement will include the ChatGPT-4o model, but that would be a logical conclusion, as a partnership to either improve or replace Siri. Apple does not comment on unannounced products.

OpenAI is still believed to be working on search, and analysts at Macquarie Equity Research pointed out that ChatGPT already has a web-scraping infrastructure. "Though Sam Altman doused media speculation about Monday releases, we think OpenAI moving into search is a matter of when, not if," Macquarie analysts wrote in a note Monday.

Also read: Why Alphabet investors should not worry about OpenAI's search engine, for now

Alphabet Inc.'s (GOOG) (GOOGL) Google I/O developers conference begins on Tuesday, where the search-engine giant is expected to unveil its own AI initiatives.

The voice-assistant component of OpenAI's ChatGPT 4o was not perfect, and was on the overly chatty side. At one point in the demo it commented unprompted about the outfit one of the researchers was wearing, until it was interrupted by Murati. But it did respond to requests to change its tone, make itself more dramatic, turn its voice into a robotic one, and helped explain a math problem and a chart on a screen.

How well ChatGPT 4o will fare in the real world, with different users, will soon be clear, as more people begin to experiment and play with it. But its initial debut seemed both impressive and a bit scary. Apple, Google and other companies could end up eventually licensing this technology to improve their own voice assistants - or it could completely replace them.

-Therese Poletti

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05-13-24 1853ET

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