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Perhaps Sam Altman’s strawberry picture was a secret message after all, as roughly a week after the OpenAI CEO posted it on social media the company has confirmed that ChatGPT got a surprise update last week that it hadn’t told anyone about.
Making this known on social media, an official ChatGPT account revealed that “there's a new GPT-4o model out in ChatGPT,” adding in a follow-up that this isn't a new model like a GPT-5 upgrade, just an improvement to the existing GPT-4o model.
there's a new GPT-4o model out in ChatGPT since last week. hope you all are enjoying it and check it out if you haven't! we think you'll like it 😃August 12, 2024
In its Model Release Notes we’re given a vague description of what these upgrades include – namely "Bug fixes and performance improvements” based on “experiment results and qualitative feedback” – which isn’t much to go on.
OpenAI admits that there’s not a new capability or a specific upgrade it can point to, even calling itself out for not having a quantitative benchmark which it can use to explain these smaller AI behavior tweaks. So we just have to trust it, and look at anecdotal reports that GPT-4o now works better than it did before.
It’s also unclear if this improvement is the ‘Strawberry’ project we’ve been waiting for. This is a codename which leaked earlier this year for the next ChatGPT model update, and while this latest improvement would count 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.
It does, however, raise the question of how you track AI improvements. You can discuss the amount of data an AI has access to, or the processing power of the chipsets powering AI on devices, but what the end user cares about is how useful the AI actually is, which is a difficult thing to quantify as it's based on people's perception, rather than something you could measure. Here's hoping someone (OpenAI or otherwise) comes up with an effective benchmarking tool soon.
i love summer in the garden pic.twitter.com/Ter5Z5nFMcAugust 7, 2024
Regardless, if you want to actually use the new ChatGPT model we have good news, it has already replaced the old version of GPT-4o inside the tool. So simply go to ChatGPT and you’ll be able to talk to the new bot just like you did the last version of GPT-4o – though for free users it’ll come with a message limit.
Alternatively, you might want to check out all of the Gemini AI upgrades Google announced for its upcoming Google Pixel 9 phones. Features like Gemini Live and Add Me seem very impressive already, and we expect the tools will only get better.