OpenAI’s unsubtle approximation of the actor’s voice for its new GPT-4o software was a stark illustration of the firm’s high-handed attitude

On Monday 13 May, OpenAI livestreamed an event to launch a fancy new product – a large language model (LLM) dubbed GPT-4o – that the company’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, claimed to be more user-friendly and faster than boring ol’ ChatGPT. It was also more versatile, and multimodal, which is tech-speak for being able to interact in voice, text and vision. Key features of the new model, we were told, were that you could interrupt it in mid-sentence, that it had very low latency (delay in responding) and that it was sensitive to the user’s emotions.

Viewers were then treated to the customary toe-curling spectacle of “Mark and Barret”, a brace of tech bros straight out of central casting, interacting with the machine. First off, Mark confessed to being nervous, so the machine helped him to do some breathing exercises to calm his nerves. Then Barret wrote a simple equation on a piece of paper and the machine showed him how to find the value of X, after which he showed it a piece of computer code and the machine was able to deal with that too.

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© Photograph: Valéry Hache/AFP/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Valéry Hache/AFP/Getty Images

Microsoft said it would invest $1.5 billion in G42, an Emirati company with ties to China, as Washington and Beijing maneuver to secure tech influence in the Persian Gulf.

© Grant Hindsley for The New York Times

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