The AI game has just changed...
The business news that matters.
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Off to Lunch…
Remember when Sam Altman was let go as OpenAI’s CEO in November last year, only for 700 of its 770 employees to publish an open letter threatening to quit and paving the way back to his previous position? Well, a lot has happened in the artificial intelligence space since then and the release of OpenAI’s GPT-4o has just raised the bar again.
AI has been a hot topic in business for a number of years. This was heightened in the UK with blockbuster deals involving self-driving car firm Wayve and cybersecurity darling Darktrace, as well as Rishi Sunak’s vision of “making the UK a global leader in safe AI“.
OpenAI’s new flagship model, unveiled yesterday, builds on its predecessor’s abilities “but is much faster and improves on its capabilities across text, voice and vision“. That means there are some revolutionary real-life applications to it.
One of the stand-out features is real-time translation, which translates a conversation between two people speaking different languages into their native tongue. The demonstration shows an English speaker getting what a Spanish speaker is saying translated into English and vice versa.
Another application comes off the back of a strategic partnership between Open AI and Danish start-up Be My Eyes, which was designed to serve the community of more than 285 million people who are blind or have low vision. The promotional video shows the new model assisting a Be My Eyes user around London by answering questions about Buckingham Palace, the movements of ducks on a pond and even helping to hail a passing black cab.
The new model also may have changed the game in the education space. To show off these capabilities, the company teamed up with Sal Khan from the Khan Academy, a non-profit educational organisation, to show how it can be a tutor for students. In the demonstration, GPT-4o is asked not to give away the answer straightaway but rather nudge the student in the right direction …
Just how far the conversational element of AI has come along is illustrated in a discussion around dad jokes. In the video, it’s revealed that the speaker is about to become a father and wants to gauge his dad joke skills.
The other aspect many have been fascinated with is OpenAI’s pricing. While there are a few different price bands baked into the offering, Altman has maintained that this is a vital consideration in its business model. He says:
A key part of our mission is to put very capable AI tools in the hands of people for free (or at a great price). I am very proud that we’ve made the best model in the world available for free in ChatGPT, without ads or anything like that.
Our initial conception when we started OpenAI was that we’d create AI and use it to create all sorts of benefits for the world. Instead, it now looks like we’ll create AI and then other people will use it to create all sorts of amazing things that we all benefit from.
We are a business and will find plenty of things to charge for, and that will help us provide free, outstanding AI service to (hopefully) billions of people.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the tool’s capabilities. With competition in the AI sector well and truly heating up, we’ll watch what the company’s rivals do next. The timing of the this latest iteration does seem rather strategic, given Google is set to announce its new AI features at its annual developers' conference today.
The search giant has been on the wrong side of the news spectrum after a series of gaffs with its AI offering. Earlier this year, social media users showed how prompts for historical images of people generated inaccurate or unexpected results, in what critics and Elon Musk called anti-White bias.
Now the real question here is has anyone thought about putting this tech into a car…?
Podcast…
The latest episode of Business Leader covers the journey of one of Europe’s best-known entrepreneurs. In 1989, Mark Dixon had a realisation: the traditional office didn’t work for many businesses and they needed something more flexible.
More than 30 years later, he has been proved right. IWG, the business he founded, is worth more than £2bn. It runs 4,000 serviced offices around the world, which millions of people use as a base to do their jobs and have meetings.
But it has been a challenging and often lonely battle to get IWG to this point. This is a story that involves rapid growth, Chapter 11 bankruptcy and flashy new rivals…
You can listen to the episode on Substack here, Spotify here and Apple here
Other stories that matter…
1. ONS figures released this morning show that the country’s wage growth has remained solid, despite unemployment rising to its highest point for almost a year. Wage growth sits at 6 per cent, denting prospects of an interest rate cut next month, while unemployment has increased to 4.3 per cent. You can read more here.
2. Jeremy Hunt has said that the UK can create a trillion-dollar homegrown tech giant to rival Microsoft or Google. When pressed about the stream of takeover bids for UK companies, Hunt said: “Big companies IPOing and then going private is part of how capitalism works. It shouldn’t worry us at all, if that’s happening to some great British companies.” You can read the interview with The FT here.
3. Anglo American appears to be going on the defensive to protect itself from a buyout from rival BHP. The FTSE 100 group is considering selling diamond firm De Beers, among other measures, to focus on copper and iron ore and stave off a potential hostile takeover. Read more here.
4. Asda is looking to add a new product to its offering… housing. The supermarket chain is teaming up with Barratt Developments to redevelop a 10-acre site in London. The “town centre” would include 1,500 homes and marks “a significant milestone for the business”. You can read more here.
5. Boots’s US owner is fast-tracking its search for a buyer to take on the British health and beauty retailer. Bloomberg is reporting that the Walgreens Boots Alliance has put a £7bn price tag on Boots, which employs around 52,000 people and has 2,100 stores. You can read the full story here.
And finally…
Roaring Kitty and meme stocks are back in the news today and no, it’s not because you’ve entered a time portal to 2021. Loveable underdog video game retailer GameStop has seen its stock shoot up 71 per cent thanks to a single post on X by Keith Gill, the artist otherwise known as Roaring Kitty.
If you haven’t watched 2023’s Dumb Money, I would highly recommend it for the context around how the little guy took on Wall Street and how GameStop became one of the world’s hottest listed companies.
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