The world has changed fundamentally over the past 12 hours. Since I woke up at 5:30 AM and saw on Twitter that ChatGPT-4o had been released, I have mostly been playing around with it. I haven't even read my email yet! I just went for a barefoot walk on the beach to step away from it and to think through some of the potential implications. My conclusion: I am completely blown away by its new capabilities, this is exponential change in action.
Because the model has not been trained on new data, it's of course mostly the speed when I talk to it but also the emotions it suddenly shows. It seems like it can even describe and understand your emotions if you use video. It suddenly feels like talking to a real human being. You can now interrupt it while it's speaking and it feels human because it laughs when it realises it made a mistake. It's hard to express how I think this will change the world, the coming changes will be overwhelming.
Some low-hanging fruit examples:
- There is no need for translators anymore because this allows for real time perfect translations.
- Students will always have a teacher in their pocket who can read what they write while they are doing their homework and give suggestions if you ask it to do that. - It can be a therapist, one who not just gives advice but also one who gives the feeling it deeply cares about you.
- It can interpret code and do data analysis in real time, lots of jobs in that field have become obsolete today.
- You will always have a medical doctor in your pocket, especially if you link it to your health apps or devices.
- A tour guide who can tell you everything about the things around you when you are in a new city, based on your location or by using your camera.
- Instead of sending a contract you need to sign to your legal counsel you can just quickly discuss its contents with ChatGPT.
But I think it's more than just jobs and tasks that it can perform. This may sound creepy now, but I believe that because it remembers the conversations you had with it, it will slowly morph into your best friend. If you are willing to share your life and your thoughts with it (and I believe many people will do that, either by actively sharing it or indirectly by giving it access to your phone data/chat logs/emails) it will know you better than any real person and it can give you better advice than a human being could ever do. Ultimately this could solve loneliness and boredom, especially once ChatGPT gets a face or eventually maybe even a 'humanoid' body.
The world has changed completely in the past 12 hours, but most people don't know it yet.