Chat GPT 4O
I wrote this for my highschool newspaper.
Open AI just released its newest model, Chat GPT 4 Omni and its capabilities and applications are unfathomable. The possible applications of this are endless. Teaching, programming, science, and medical fields can and will be affected. In the video showcase on their website, it is displayed deciphering video and speech all at once with great accuracy. On paper, it does not sound that impressive, but for perspective, it took Chat GPT 3 a handful of seconds to analyze a single picture a year ago. Now it is deciphering videos and audio in real-time, teaching math, looking around a room, and giving life advice. Out of all that, what surprises me most is the voice it uses. It has all the “ahs” and “umms” of human speech. You can still slightly tell that it has a robotic voice, but it is hard to tell. It’s honestly scary how much the model is capable of, with the uncertainty of where it could lead, the way it would affect jobs, and how much of the human element of life would still be around once the technology is fully utilized. And we are on a steady course towards that point. Carl’s Jr invested in a company called Presto, which collects the orders of customers in drive-throughs. It uses an AI to process the orders and respond to customers. It still needs some human help should it fail, however. It is already being used in 277k locations across the U.S. All of this AI mumbo-jumbo often makes me think of science fiction: more specifically, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Near the end of the film, Hal, the AI in charge of the ship’s functions, is deactivated while singing Daisy Bell. This is a reference to the first computer to ever sing. It was in 1961 at Bell Labs, located in New Jersey, where John Kelly, Carol Lockbaum, and Max Mathews put the composition together using an IBM 7094 computer. The IBM 7094 was a top-of-line, new technology at the time. It could do 250,000 calculations per second, was just short in size of a grand piano, and cost more than 34 million, accounting for inflation. NASA used it in their space flights, and the Air Force used it to track ballistic missiles. In comparison, just 63 years later, we are doing trillions of calculations a second in the palm of our hand. The iPhone 12 can do 11 trillion calculations per second, is 5 inches by 2 inches in size, and costs 800$. Technology has progressed faster than anyone can comprehend. It’s unregulated and unchecked. Even lawmakers barely know what they are seeing; I doubt most people do either, but it doesn’t matter. The fiction of the past, the vast distant future of yesterday, is in the palms of our hands. Whether that means the world ends, like most science fiction, or makes our lives better, it is here and irrefutable.
By Luka Murcray [email protected]