ChatGPT has been unavoidable in recent months, and it appears that Microsoft is about to upgrade the AI tool with an update that will thrust it back into the spotlight. That’s because the company plans to release GPT-4 as soon as next week, with the ability to create AI-generated videos from simple text prompts.
The news was revealed by Andreas Braun, Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft Germany, at a recent event titled “AI in Focus — Digital Kickoff” (via Heise). According to Braun, “We will introduce GPT-4 next week … we will have multimodal models that will offer completely different possibilities — for example videos.”
The underlying large language model technology that powers apps like ChatGPT is GPT-4. ChatGPT can currently only respond in text form, but an upcoming update appears to change that.
ChatGPT not be the first tool to output AI-created videos. In 2022, Facebook owner Meta launched Make-A-Video, which creates realistic videos based on short text prompts. By the sound of it, the next version of ChatGPT might be able to do something similar.
AI videos, music, and more
Microsoft stated at the AI event that GPT-4 would be “multimodal.” According to Holger Kenn, Director of Business Strategy at Microsoft Germany, this will enable the company’s AI to translate a user’s text into images, music, and video.
Microsoft demonstrated how a call centre could use GPT-4 to automatically convert phone conversations between employees and customers into text, saving significant time and effort that would otherwise be spent summarising those calls after they ended.
However, GPT-4 apparently launching as soon as next week, we might not have long to wait before we see what the next version of ChatGPT is capable of — and whether Microsoft can fix any of the lingering problems it has been having with its AI assistant.
