Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) On Monday, OpenAI debuted GPT-4o (o for "omni"), a major new AI model that can ostensibly converse using speech in real time, reading emotional cues and responding to visual input. It operates faster than OpenAI's previous best model, GPT-4 Turbo, and will be free for ChatGPT users and available as a service through API, rolling out over the next few weeks, OpenAI says. OpenAI revealed the new audio conversation and vision comprehension capabilities in a YouTube livestream titled "OpenAI Spring Update," presented by OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and employees Mark Chen and Barret Zoph that included live demos of GPT-4o in action. OpenAI claims that GPT-4o responds to audio inputs in about 320 milliseconds on average, which is similar to human response times in conversation, according to a 2009 study, and much shorter than the typical 2–3 second lag experienced with previous models.