OpenAI’s Olivier Godement, head of product for its platform, and Romain Huet, head of developer experience, are on a whistle-stop tour around the world. Last week, I sat down with the pair in London before DevDay, the company’s annual developer conference. London’s DevDay is the first one for the company outside San Francisco. Godement and Huet are heading to Singapore next.

It’s been a busy few weeks for the company. In London, OpenAI announced updates to its new Realtime API platform, which allows developers to build voice features into their applications. The company is rolling out new voices and a function that lets developers generate prompts, which will allow them to build apps and more helpful voice assistants more quickly. Meanwhile for consumers, OpenAI announced it was launching ChatGPT search, which allows users to search the internet using the chatbot. Read more here.

Both developments pave the way for the next big thing in AI: agents. These are AI assistants that can complete complex chains of tasks, such as booking flights. (You can read my explainer on agents here.)  — Read More

ChatGPT is officially an AI-powered web search engine. The company is enabling real-time information in conversations for paid subscribers today (along with SearchGPT waitlist users), with free, enterprise, and education users gaining access in the coming weeks.

Rather than launching as a separate product, web search will be integrated into ChatGPT’s existing interface. The feature determines when to tap into web results based on queries, though users can also manually trigger web searches. ChatGPT’s web search integration finally closes a key competitive gap with rivals like Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, which have long offered real-time internet access in their AI conversations. — Read More

SambaNova Systems has just unveiled a new demo on Hugging Face, offering a high-speed, open-source alternative to OpenAI’s o1 model.

The demo, powered by Meta’s Llama 3.1 Instruct model, is a direct challenge to OpenAI’s recently released o1 model and represents a significant step forward in the race to dominate enterprise AI infrastructure. — Read More

Last weekend, I got married at a summer camp, and during the day our guests competed in a series of games inspired by the show Survivor that my now-wife and I orchestrated. When we were planning the games in August, we wanted one station to be a memory challenge, where our friends and family would have to memorize part of a poem and then relay it to their teammates so they could re-create it with a set of wooden tiles.

I thought OpenAI’s GPT-4o, its leading model at the time, would be perfectly suited to help. I asked it to create a short wedding-themed poem, with the constraint that each letter could only appear a certain number of times so we could make sure teams would be able to reproduce it with the provided set of tiles. GPT-4o failed miserably. The model repeatedly insisted that its poem worked within the constraints, even though it didn’t. It would correctly count the letters only after the fact, while continuing to deliver poems that didn’t fit the prompt. Without the time to meticulously craft the verses by hand, we ditched the poem idea and instead challenged guests to memorize a series of shapes made from colored tiles. (That ended up being a total hit with our friends and family, who also competed in dodgeball, egg tosses, and capture the flag.)

However, last week OpenAI released a new model called o1 (previously referred to under the code name “Strawberry” and, before that, Q*) that blows GPT-4o out of the water for this type of purpose.  — Read More

OpenAI finally unveiled its rumored “Strawberry” AI language model on Thursday, claiming significant improvements in what it calls “reasoning” and problem-solving capabilities over previous large language models (LLMs). Formally named “OpenAI o1,” the model family will initially launch in two forms, o1-preview and o1-mini, available today for ChatGPT Plus and certain API users.

OpenAI claims that o1-preview outperforms its predecessor, GPT-4o, on multiple benchmarks, including competitive programming, mathematics, and “scientific reasoning.” However, people who have used the model say it does not yet outclass GPT-4o in every metric. Other users have criticized the delay in receiving a response from the model, owing to the multi-step processing occurring behind the scenes before answering a query. — Read More

Back in April, Meta teased that it was working on a first for the AI industry: an open-source model with performance that matched the best private models from companies like OpenAI.

Today, that model has arrived. Meta is releasing Llama 3.1, the largest-ever open-source AI model, which the company claims outperforms GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet on several benchmarks. It’s also making the Llama-based Meta AI assistant available in more countries and languages while adding a feature that can generate images based on someone’s specific likeness. CEO Mark Zuckerberg now predicts that Meta AI will be the most widely used assistant by the end of this year, surpassing ChatGPT. — Read More

OpenAI has intensified the AI arms race by announcing free fine-tuning for its GPT-4o Mini model, just hours after Meta launched its open-source Llama 3.1 model.

While OpenAI had teased the imminent arrival of customization features in last week’s GPT-4o Mini announcement, the timing of this release couldn’t have been more perfect—or more pointed. Just hours after Meta released its Llama 3.1 model, OpenAI fired back with its own offering. Coincidence? Perhaps. But in the high-stakes competition for AI dominance, such precise moves rarely happen by chance. — Read More

OpenAI introduced its flagship GPT-4o model at the Spring Update event and made it free for everyone. Just after a day, at the Google I/O 2024 event, Google debuted the Gemini 1.5 Pro model for consumers via Gemini Advanced. Now that two flagship models are available for consumers, let’s compare ChatGPT 4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro and see which one does a better job. On that note, let’s begin.

We have performed many commonsense reasoning and multimodal tests on both ChatGPT 4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro. ChatGPT 4o performs much better than Gemini 1.5 Pro in a variety of tasks including reasoning, code generation, multimodal understanding, and more. — Read More

If you’re using the free version of ChatGPT, you’re about to get a boost. On Monday, OpenAI debuted a new flagship model of its underlying engine, called GPT-4o, along with key changes to its user interface.

The chatbot, which sparked a whole new wave of consumer-friendly AI, comes in two flavors: the free version, ChatGPT 3.5, and a version that costs $20 per month, ChatGPT 4.0. With that subscription fee, you get access to a large language model that can handle a lot more data as it generates responses to your prompts.

GPT-4o should close that gap, at least somewhat. Your interactions with ChatGPT will also become more conversational. — Read More