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The AI Race Escalates: GPT-4o and Google I/O

PLUS: Google Search Changes Forever

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AI For All
May 17, 2024

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Hello readers,

Welcome to another edition of This Week in the Future! OpenAI unveiled GPT-4o and made it free, with many proclaiming that the movie Her is now a reality. Plus, Google stepped up to the plate and announced Project Astra (and a ton of other stuff) at this year’s Google I/O. The AI wars have truly escalated.

Let’s get into it!

GPT-4o the Humanity

OpenAI has released GPT-4o, an upgrade to GPT-4 that has an impressively emotive, human-like voice. You can talk to GPT-4o, and it responds with zero latency. Many have already compared it to Samantha, the AI assistant from the 2013 film Her, which we reviewed in our article titled The Best (and Worst) AI Movies.

Furthermore, GPT-4o is natively multimodal (like Google’s Gemini) and will be available to all ChatGPT users including free users. The only difference between account tiers is the amount of messages you can send in a given time window.

Capabilities

GPT-4o is slightly smarter than GPT-4 Turbo while being 2x faster, 50% less expensive, and less rate limited. The main differences are the native multimodality and the real-time conversational capabilities. In fact, GPT-4o can detect when you interrupt it and promptly stop speaking as a result. It can also:

You can view all of the GPT-4o demos here. There will also be a ChatGPT desktop app where you can share your screen with GPT-4o to get assistance with anything.

Why This Matters

While it’s not GPT-5, it is a significant step towards human-like AI agents, which brings with it plenty of promise and plenty of risk. This development coincides with Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, who led the charge on AI safety, leaving OpenAI. His colleague on the Superalignment team, Jan Leike, also resigned. GPT-4o has received mixed reactions due to its implications for the trajectory of AI, with some voicing concerns about so-called pseudanthropy given GPT-4o’s emotive voice. The arrival of zero-latency, emotive conversational AI poses interesting questions about software design itself.

Everything AI at Google I/O

If Google Cloud Next was a tsunami of AI news, then Google I/O was … two tsunamis? Google should be concerned that there’s a spy amongst their ranks because OpenAI’s GPT-4o (revealed a day earlier) is essentially the same as Google’s announcement of Project Astra, a conversational AI assistant built on Gemini that can understand scenes from live video. The latency is slightly worse than GPT-4o, but impressive nonetheless.

We can’t cover every announcement, but here are the highlights:

Google is rolling out its AI search features. Google’s AI Overviews will now hover above the humble blue links (which you can still filter for). According to Gartner, search volume will drop 25% by 2026 thanks to AI. It is feared that for ad-dependent websites that purely provide information, this could be disastrous and spell the end of SEO. Webmasters will have to hope that the AI gods choose to cite their website. It remains to be seen how Google will square AI with its ads business. Perplexity has ideas.

Our Take

If you’re curious how many times the word ‘AI’ was uttered during the event, CEO Sundar Pichai kept count. Google may have finally found its stride, which is bad news for OpenAI, which is trying to counter Google’s advantage of a massive user base by making GPT-4o free. OpenAI is also rumored to be working on a search product and could partner with Apple to integrate GPT-4o natively on iPhones. But what really escalates the AI wars is the almost equal capabilities of GPT-4o and Project Astra. Google and OpenAI are truly in a race to build seamless AI agents.

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