Maybe Sam Altman’s Strawberry Photo was a secret message after all, because about a week after the OpenAI The CEO posted it on social media and the company confirmed that ChatGPT I received a surprise update last week that I hadn’t told anyone about.
Making this known on social media, an official ChatGPT account revealed that there is a “new GPT-4o model in ChatGPT,” adding in a follow-up that it is not a new model like an upgrade of GPT-5, just an improvement of the existing model. GPT-4o model.
There is a new GPT-4o model available on ChatGPT since last week. I hope you all enjoy it and check it out if you haven’t yet! We think you’ll like it 😃August 12, 2024
In his Model Release Notes We’re given a vague description of what these upgrades include – namely “bug fixes and performance improvements” based on “experimental results and qualitative feedback” – which isn’t much to go on.
OpenAI admits that there are no specific new features or upgrades it can point to, and even criticizes itself for not having a quantitative benchmark it can rely on to explain these small tweaks in AI behavior. So we just have to trust it and look at the anecdotal reports that GPT-4o is now performing better than before.
It is also unclear whether this improvement is the ‘Strawberry’ project we’ve been waiting for. This is a codename that leaked earlier this year for the next update to the ChatGPT model, and while this latest improvement counts as an update, and may have been what Sam Altman was teasing with that strawberry image, leakers were expecting something a little more substantial for Strawberry.
This does raise the question of how to track AI improvements, though. You can argue about how much data an AI has access to or how powerful the chipsets powering the AI on devices are, but what matters to the end user is the actual usefulness of the AI, which is a hard thing to quantify because it relies on people’s perceptions, rather than something you can measure. Hopefully someone (OpenAI or otherwise) will come up with an effective benchmarking tool soon.
Anyway, if you really want to use the new ChatGPT model, we have good news: it has already replaced the old version of GPT-4o in the tool. So all you have to do is go to ChatGPT and you will be able to talk to the new bot as you did with the latest version of GPT-4o, although for free users there will be a message limit.
Alternatively, you can also check out all the AI Gemini upgrades Google announced for its next Google Pixel 9 phones. Features such as Gemini Live And Add me This already looks very impressive and we hope the tools will only get better.
