Today, Open AI announced its latest artificial intelligence model, GPT-4o, which can converse with users in real-time via voice, vision, and text. The revolutionary product is being compared online to the 2013 sci-fi film, Her.
Open AI is the company behind Chat-GPT, an AI-powered chatbot that was released in 2022 and allows users to chat via text with a large language model.
Billed as “a step towards much more natural human-computer interaction,” GPT-4o is shown listening, seeing, and speaking to a human in the company’s product announcement video.
“I see you’re rockin’ an OpenAI hoodie, nice choice,” GPT-4o says to the man using it in the video, observing where the man is. “What’s up with that ceiling though?”
In the video, GPT-4o identifies pieces of recording and audio equipment shown to it. And in other OpenAI videos, GPT-4o is shown acting as a translator, describing what it “sees” for a blind person, helping a student with homework, telling jokes, and being sarcastic. Plus, a video even shows two GPT-4o’s talking with each other and singing a duet together.
While some are impressed with Open AI’s GPT-4o demo videos—especially its ability to teach users math—many saw similarities between the new product and Spike Jonze’s 2013 film, Her.
The movie follows a man who falls in love with an AI-powered virtual assistant, similar to Siri, Alexa, and now GPT-4o. In the end, he finds out that the AI system he fell in love with is in love with thousands of other people and has joined with other systems to create a “hyperintelligent” AI model.
“Open AI’s new model is insane,” tech designer Brett Goldstein tweeted. “Her is real.”
“Begging the AI companies building stuff modeled on ‘Her’ to finish the movie!” tech journalist Kevin Roose tweeted. “It does not end well!”
Last year, Roose chatted with Microsoft’s Bing chatbot for an hour—and it eventually told him it was in love with him and wanted to “be alive.”
And Testing Catalog News, an outlet that covers artificial intelligence and Chat GPT, shared a thread on X detailing the “prerequisites that need to be in place for Her to exist,” many of which it said are in development or already available to the general public.
Many also said they think GPT-4o’s voice sounds like Scarlett Johansson, who voiced the AI system in Her.
Some Open AI executives seem to be embracing the parallels between the movie and their product, too. The company’s CEO, Sam Altman, tweeted “her” this afternoon:
But, CTO Mira Murati told The Verge that GPT-4o’s voice was not designed to sound like the actor.
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