Her.

OpenAI, the company that brought ChatGPT to the masses, had a big spring event yesterday. It was their opportunity to show the latest technology the company is bringing to the masses. It didn’t have the polish of an Apple presentation but I still found it to be an interesting thing to watch.

In yesterday’s presentation, OpenAI introduced us to their latest advancements in ChatGPT. It has been dubbed “ChatGPT-4o”. While the “o” looks like the zero on a 1970 Sharp Microcompet calculator, it’s actually pronounced “o”. The “o” stands for Omni.

The presenters went on to share all the new things these LLMs, or Large Language Models, can do. This involves being able to interact with users via video and speech, as well as the default voice sounding a lot like Scarlett Johansson in the movie “Her”.

And that’s not where the similarities to Samantha in “Her” end. There were also many demos where two AIs were talking to each other, singing with each other, and exhibiting other activities that has normally been relegated to the likes of Sci-Fi movies.

I have complained for the past decade that it seems like technology advances have been iterative. Apple’s Vision Pro headset, revealed earlier this year, had promise of technology that would take us to the next step, but from what I’m seeing in various tech circles, it hasn’t really taken off.

We all know that some fear “Artificial Intelligence” taking over the world. These AIs, even in their latest incarnations, are still very much Large Language Models, being quite clever in the presentation of human derived knowledge, logic, and thought processes. But hearing them interact with one another immediately made me realize that the phrase, “I’ll have my people talk to your people”, is going to become much more commonplace.

Those humans that work in call centers might have a reason to be concerned about the longevity of their careers. If any space is going to be invaded by this technology, this is going to be it.