This week, OpenAI released a surprisingly flirty new large language model (LLM) called GPT-4o — that’s a lower-case “o,” for “omni” — that it claims can react to live video from a smartphone’s camera, giving a new demo a fluid sense of the chatbot being present in the world in a way that previous attempts haven’t. The new AI, which will power the upcoming free version of ChatGPT, sounds astonishingly natural in the demos, making off-the-cuff quips, snarky comments, and otherwise human-like noises that inject plenty of emotion into its outputs. But the illusion is far from perfect. In one demo that involves a tester introducing GPT-4o to his adorable dog, the AI responds by making a bizarre and unnervingly robotic series of screeches that coalesce into the kind of “aww” a real human might make when meeting a furry friend. In other words, it’s as if an AI is trying its best to pass as a human — but not quite getting there. “I want to introduce you to somebody,” the tester tells ChatGPT. “Whh-ell hee-eekkhhh-ello there cutie,” the AI responds, sounding more natural after it gets past the more emotive part of the phrase. The company claims its latest version of ChatGPT will be “much faster” thanks to a new model that was trained “end-to-end across text, vision, and audio, meaning that all inputs and outputs are processed by the same neural network.” A big part of its Monday announcement is ChatGPT’s new “video mode,” which allows…ChatGPT's Vision-Enabled Chatbot Makes Extremely Weird Sound When It Sees a Dog