This week, artificial intelligence caught up with the future – or at least Hollywood’s idea of it from a decade ago., will be an unsettling reminder of their concerns about the technology’s rapid advances, with a key OpenAI safety researcher leaving this week in a disagreement over the company’s direction. For others the GPT-4o release will be confirmation that innovation continues in a field promising benefits for all.
More landmark developments are looming: OpenAI is working on its next model, GPT-5, as well as a search engine; Google is preparing to release Astra and is rolling out AI-generated search queries outside the US; Microsoft is reportedly working on its own AI model and has hired the British entrepreneur Mustafa Suleyman to; Apple is reportedly in talks with OpenAI to put ChatGPT in its smartphones; and billions of dollars of AI investment is being poured into tech firms of all sizes.
Rowan Curran, an analyst at the research firm Forrester, says the six months since Bletchley have already seen significant changes such as the emergence of so-called “multi-modal” models like GPT-4 and Gemini, meaning they can handle a variety of formats such as text, image and audio. The GPT model that
Some already see a market that will be dominated by a handful of wealthy companies who can afford the vast energy and data crunching costs that come with building AI models and operating them. Would-be competitors are also being brought under their wings, to the concern of competition authoritiesand EU. Microsoft, for instance, is a backer of OpenAI and France’s Mistral, while Amazon has invested heavily in Anthropic.