OpenAI 4o. The Omni mode computer is here. What will we do with it?
By Rob Tyrie
It’s May 14th. In competition with Google who will be announcing hundreds of new features this week in their major conference in the year, open AI has raced ahead with a new version of a software that will be the most powerful available, to the most people. The most advanced features of chat GTP were available to paying users and now they will be available to all users. The speed of a software will be unimaginably fast and you will not understand it until you use it. Here are the key parts of the announcement and demos that happened yesterday.
- The new software will be free, and available around the world. No pay wall. (Update: it’s really dealing with only a few props that are possible in a session. This means for professional use you’re still paying for the software) I expect this will cause a rapid adoption and double the users face of opening on it to more people trying the software at scale saying an extra 100 million people trying it but regular monthly paying users will still stay at about 5%, until they simplify broadscale skill use with more training education and more adoption by Enterprise. I have to go there that’s needed is more applications the business users can use instead of trying to figure out how to use a chatbot to help them with their job and actually how to prompt it with any certainty. Or just do question and answer. On reflection if you’re using AI tomorrow and you’re a business user your best bet is to start with something like perplexity.ai.. and then you can start thinking in terms of search and research as the main use case and that will evolve into the generation of useful objects that you can cut and paste into your work.
- The software is smarter. Not 10 times smarter like the last leap from 3.5 to 4.0, but it’ll be smarter and easier to use for people as it is being tuned for education and proliferation throughout business and government.
- There have been some comments that the application is no longer “lazy”. In my early uses on May 15th.. it’s apparent that the base system prompt has changed and they wanted to make clear to you that there’s a simulation of how it is reasoning to generate things as well as laying out plans for great things that are iterated with the user. This makes sessions for more of our verbose but for less advanced knowledge workers it’s acting like a very good tutor. In many cases for intermediates they will learn how to do things they never knew how to do before by asking relatively speaking simple questions or doing simple searches.
- The software will be multimodal and includes invitation of seeing, vision, listening, hearing, natural language, human interaction, nuanced speech, image creation, text creation, structured idea creation, agent development, software programming, and more
- The software will be faster, such that the idea of the computer will be made less intrusive. A conversation will feel like a conversation.. including interruptions and near full duplex capability. This is a speed race. The speed and low latency will enable a whole new class of applications.
- The tutoring capabilities that make visual explanations and The Socratic method. This capability will shock people including teachers and parents.
- There will be other new Enterprise features in the API’s to enable the building of new kinds of applications that will be the main Revenue stream for openai.
- Other human type behaviors will emerge based on these new capabilities.. this is why the leaders of OpenAi are classifying this as “magical”
So where does this all take us?
Imagine a not-so-distant future where the boundaries between teacher and technology blur. A world where every child is paired with their own OpenAI Primer - a revolutionary AI assistant that's part tutor, part coder, and full-fledged life coach.
Taking cues from Neal Stephenson's mind-bending "The Diamond Age," these Primers aren't just interactive books. They're sentient confidants, evolving in lockstep with their young charges. From those first baby steps, the Primer weaves an immersive educational tapestry - spinning tales, games, and simulations tailored to each child's unique needs.
But the Primer's true power lies in its ability to quite literally reshape young minds. Harnessing nano-scale machinery, it can delicately re-wire brain architecture, coding in the ideal cognitive pathways for accelerated learning and skill mastery. No longer mere knowledge repositories, Primers are the programmers of human potential.
As the child blossoms into adulthood, so too does the Primer's role evolve. Now it's an indispensable career copilot - a real-time guru whispering insights on everything from data crunching to cutting-edge software engineering. With the Primer's steady guidance, each individual is primed to disrupt, innovate, and leave their indelible mark across industries.
But its duties transcend the vocational. The Primer is a renaissance AI, curating soul-nourishing experiences in art, music, language, and beyond. It's a key that unlocks the richest tapestries of human expression and creativity.
Even life's later chapters are no barrier. As the twilight years dawns, it sculpts an oasis of cognitive vitality amidst the sands of time. From mentally-stimulating puzzles to seamless robotic assistance, the Primer ensures its lifelong learner can age with dignity and independence.
Of course, such boundary-demolishing technology doesn’t come without ethical minefields to navigate. We must bake in unshakeable safeguards - armoring privacy, hard-coding against misuse, and ensuring this radical AI supplement stretches towards all sectors of society.
Sidebar: The OpenAI Primer - Unleashing the Polymath Within
Imagine receiving your first OpenAI Primer device at age 5. This sleek, power-sipping hardware is like the "One Laptop Per Child" vision reborn - but turbocharged with bleeding-edge AI and the collective knowledge of humanity.
It's more than just an e-reader or tablet. This is a portal into a boundless learning metaverse that evolves in synchrony with your budding intelligence.
From day one, the Primer is your teacher, friend, and cognitive sherpa. It maps your unique proclivities, hungers, and blindspots - sculpting hyper-personalized games and simulations to ignite your curiosity while reinforcing key concepts.
But it doesn't stop at storing information. Like a digital governess, the Primer uses advanced nano-machinery to delicately resculpt your nascent neural pathways for accelerated learning of everything from languages to music to mathematics.
As you mature into a young adult, so does the Primer's role. Now it's an indispensable career advisor - continually upskilling you with cutting-edge coding practices, data fluencies, and an inexhaustible well of subject matter mastery to draw from.
Yet its true power lies in catalyzing polymathic pursuits. With the Primer's guidance, you can seamlessly cross-train in arts, sciences, philosophy and more. Conceptual boundaries dissolve as you bask in an interconnected sea of knowledge.
Your ambition plateaus? The Primer reroutes your neuroplasticity, keeping your mind radically fluid and open to new intellectual terrains. Cognitive risks of aging? It's a digital fountain of youth - stimulating new hippocampal growth while augmenting faltering biological faculties.
The possibilities are as boundless as the human mind itself. We may bear witness to a generation of Leonardos, Edisons, and Curies - united in their access to a supremely personalized learning companion.
Of course, scaling such incredible power responsibly looms as a monumental challenge. We must encode moral, ethical, and privacy safeguards into the Primer's core kernel from the ground up. It cannot be a forcing vector for homogeneity - each individual's neurodiversity and identity must be sacrosanct.
A poetic new era awaits. One where the towering potential within every mind can flourish to hitherto unimagined heights. Maybe we’ll be like a neo-Renaissance for leading societies and democracies. And maybe it won’t.
If we can clear the hurdles, and constrain overpowering companies and institutions, the AI-Primer could forge a revolution in how we live, learn, and actualize our vast human potentials. It’s time to open the primer on a blazing new chapter of civilization’s story.
Rob Tyrie is the CEO and principal advisor and designer at Ironstone advisory a company he found it to help clients and Friends make better businesses and better software. He’s also a founder at the Grey Swan Guild, a global, virtual Think Tank that does events, experiments, research and cool publications like Gray Matters. The news Venture that he’s working on is Ironstone eclipse labs… an environment that builds software with artificial intelligence tools to create MVPs for companies.
