Michael Rowe

Trying to get better at getting better

OpenAI makes GPT-4 available to everyone for free

https://openai.com/index/spring-update

This is a big update that (probably) pushes ChatGPT back into the clear leader spot. Omni’s voice, audio and video capabilities are interesting, but I think the bigger news is that OpenAI is now making GPT-4 level generative AI available to everyone for free. Considering that the free version of ChatGPT was using GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 is a 10x improvement, this is going to introduce a lot more people to a much more capable generative AI model.

GPT-4o (“o” for “omni”) is a step towards much more natural human-computer interaction—it accepts as input any combination of text, audio, and image and generates any combination of text, audio, and image outputs. It can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds, which is similar to human response time in a conversation.

GPT-4o’s text and image capabilities are starting to roll out today in ChatGPT. We are making GPT-4o available in the free tier, and to Plus users with up to 5x higher message limits. We’ll roll out a new version of Voice Mode with GPT-4o in alpha within ChatGPT Plus in the coming weeks.

This update in language capability is also important for wider use:

To make advanced AI more accessible and useful worldwide, GPT-4o’s language capabilities are improved across quality and speed. ChatGPT also now supports more than 50 languages across sign-up and login, user settings, and more.

There are a few other points worth noting in the announcement. ChatGPT Free users will now also have access to the following features:

And finally, the release of a ChatGPT desktop app (Mac only for now), which will make a significant impact on workflow, considering that you’ll no longer need to switch out of your context and go to a separate website when you want to use ChatGPT:

For both free and paid users, we’re also launching a new ChatGPT desktop app for macOS that is designed to integrate seamlessly into anything you’re doing on your computer. With a simple keyboard shortcut (Option + Space), you can instantly ask ChatGPT a question. You can also take and discuss screenshots directly in the app.

Overall, I see this as a series of quality of life improvements that make ChatGPT easier to use across a range of platforms. Of course, Omni is a leap forward in terms of it’s multimodal capability but it’s not the 10x jump we saw from GPT-3.5 to 4. For me, the ability to upload attachments as part of the context is a big deal, and this update might have me switch back to ChatGPT for a while (I typically use Claude almost exclusively at the moment).


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One response to “OpenAI makes GPT-4 available to everyone for free”

  1. […] The article at the link above covers a lot more than the quote I’ve pulled out here, and is worth reading in it’s entirety. It’s an overview of the recent OpenAI announcement. […]