The good stuff is now free

Issue #35. Ignore my previous advice

It’s a quick newsletter today because I want to let you know right away that OpenAI just made its best model available to everyone. It’s called ChatGPT 4o (pronounced “four-oh,” “o” being for “omni).

In the past, I have told you that you aren’t seeing everything AI can do if you aren’t using the paid version. Well, hooray! That’s no longer true. In fact, I’m thinking about canceling my ChatGPT Plus subscription.

This move says something interesting about the industry: At least at OpenAI, they seem more interested in getting a lot of people to see what the product can do than making revenue through $20-per-month subscriptions. It’s always been true that they need to make mountains of cash to cover the cost of making these tools, and that will likely come from businesses and governments, not individuals. It feels like they’re trying to speed acceptance of the technology in the public consciousness by getting as many people as possible to try it and love it.

Other news from the OpenAI event today felt like small things that could actually be big things. For example, the cost of using the API has been cut almost in half for developers, so it will be easier for people to build things on top of ChatGPT.

Voice chatting is also now smoother and faster; there’s almost no latency in the conversation. This doesn’t feel like a huge advance — it just does something it already did a little better — but you can also imagine how real-time, natural-sounding conversations could make AI more useful in customer call centers (ugh) or make chats more realistic with AI friends (which is a huge and growing business*).

It can also interact with live video of you, for example, interpreting your mood by looking at your face, at least at a rudimentary level. All in all, it feels like interactions are about to get a lot more personal and weird.

The demos in the event video on YouTube are about 15 minutes at normal speed, and they were interesting and fun.

What is AI sidequest?

Using AI isn’t my main job, and it probably isn’t yours either. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and Grammar Girl is my main gig, but I haven’t seen a technology this transformative since the development of the internet, and I want to learn about it. I bet you do too.

So here we are! Sidequesting together.

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^{* with business models more reliant on monthly individual subscriptions.}

^{Written by a human.}