OpenAI dropped a pretty awesome product update in their Spring Update
It’s been overdue since OpenAI made a wow impression with GPT-4.
While I’m a happy paid user, it bothered me that the GPTs created on the ChatGPT Plus/Team were only available to paid users. It’s fantastic that they now allow free users to use GPT-4o and GPTs. They justify this as what “open” means in OpenAI, instead of open source. Sam Altman explains that in his blog post on gpt-4o here.
Does it bring a significant to productivity? I don’t think so, but it can help with our expectations and alignment. In the long term, the skill to use AI tools matters. It takes deliberate practice. I can’t justify sponsoring all employees with paid ChatGPT licenses yet, but I keep pressing people to use free or paid versions as often as possible to practice. With GPT-4o being faster and accessible to free users, now it’s easier to standardize and train people to become good at one LLM. Gemini and Claude are impressive and ahead in a few aspects. I enjoy using them, but with GPT-4o, I feel good about spending more time becoming more well-versed in ChatGPT instead. Creating GPTs is a good practice that now anyone can try.
I’m most interested in the real-time ness of this update. I can’t wait to try the new voice mode when it’s supported. Right now, I can talk to the ChatGPT mobile app, but the latency is too high to make the conversation interesting, and the response is too robotic. The new voice mode acts more humanly, even cringeworthy to some. OpenAI isn’t shy about making it sound like Samatha (voice by Scarlett Johansson) in the movie Her.
While I marvel at OpenAI’s advancement, I can’t help but wonder what’s next now that they are more of a product implementation genius than a research genius. Their top brains have left, including Andrej Karpathy and Ilya Sutskever. Sam Altman is sounding more jaded this year. The company is on momentum, and I would still bet on their direction. On the other hand, Google has terrific research and the greatest amount of data, but it can be confusing which of their products are good and which are just too complex, hence not worth figuring out yet.
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