The Most Important Takeaway From OpenAI's GPT-4o Announcement

Free means free, in this case.

In an effort to head Google off at the I/O pass, OpenAI announced a series of major releases yesterday. Boffins like us though OpenAI might release a search product, but instead they did something far more interesting.

Basically, OpenAI is allowing everyone to use GPT-4o — the “O” stands for Omni — in the entry-level free plan. Previously, the free tier only offered access to GPT-3.5 which was, in truth, a hallucination machine. If you’ve tried ChatGPT under the free tier you probably went away frustrated for this very reason. GPT-4 was far more performant and far faster but OpenAI charged $20 a month. Now users will have access to the fastest and best GPT at the outset, which should cement OpenAI and Microsoft’s position as leaders of the pack.

Further, the API is now 50% cheaper and two times faster than even GPT-4 Turbo, the last state of the art. That means any tools you’re using now that depend on OpenAI will be far peppier.