ALLi News Editor, Dan Holloway
This week’s big AI news is OpenAI’s demonstration of new features for its ChatGPT-4 platform, which the company emphasized does not yet amount to ChatGPT-5. The announcement of GPT-4o, available to all users, including free users, and as a desktop app, was particularly notable.
This gives GPT-4-level intelligence but is much faster than the current experience and works simultaneously across text, visual, and audio processing, meaning there is almost no latency. It’s like having a real-time conversation. You can even interrupt (and it remembers your previous conversations). The improvements will be available in fifty different languages.
The demo was impressive or scary, depending on your perspective. The voice app created a love story about robots and narrated it, making instantaneous changes in a variety of emotions. You can watch the video of the livestreaming demo as it happened.
This comes as publishers are the latest group to express their concern over the UK government’s latest stance on AI in response to the report from the Communications and Digital Committee of the House of Lords. You can read both the report and the government's response.
The original report received support from the publishing community. The government’s response, less so. Dan Conway of the Publishers’ Association issued a robust statement condemning the lack of protection from copyright infringement.
You will remember the recent Competition and Markets Authority update on AI. This gave a sense of the UK government’s real concerns in the area, which lie firmly in ensuring that access to data is not a barrier to competition in technological markets. Copyright was not mentioned in that update. That is the backdrop against which to understand this latest turn and, I would suggest, any mollifying noises that might accompany it later.
