OpenAI wows but Google could still win
From the reaction on social media, it seems pretty clear that OpenAI’s live demo of its real-life “Her” inspired AI assistant won the battle of hearts and minds this week and upstaged Google I/O’s event.
The GPT-4o demo’s wow factor — glitches and all — showed confidence in the speedy multimodal product that Google’s pre-recorded demos just didn’t have, particularly after it fudged the Gemini “duck” demo last year.
In the future, when documentaries look back on 2024, they’ll probably show a clip of GPT-4o as this year’s “iPhone moment.”
GPT-4o (o stands for Omni) also has the advantage of being available on desktop right now, and the new voice mode will be available for ChatGPT Plus users in the coming weeks. The model will soon be free to all as well.
GPT-4o analyses Sam Altman’s expression. (X)
But with Google’s version just a few months behind (Google Live/Project Astra) and its demonstration of AI Agents doing all the busywork in products like Docs and Gmail that many people rely on every day, the search giant still has the ability to win the war.
Google touted a million new offerings at its event, from video generation to search and highlighted the raw power increase of Gemini 1.5, which will consider 15 times more information when formulating a response and will soon be able to handle an hour of video content.
But OpenAI focused on taking existing abilities that are difficult to access and making them faster and easier to use by simply having a natural language conversation with a somewhat flirty chatbot.
You can chat with, and even interrupt, GPT-4o about anything it sees through the camera, on screen, or hears through audio or the mic. This suggests a whole new world will open up for the vision impaired, and it can translate conversations in real-time, making travel and cross-border meetings so much easier.
Giving an AI access to everything you see and hear and say will be a privacy nightmare of…
..
