ChatGPT has been inescapable in recent months, and it looks like Microsoft is about to upgrade the AI tool with an update that could thrust it into the spotlight once again. That’s because the company is set to launch GPT-4 as early as next week, and it will potentially let you 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.”
GPT-4 is the underlying large language model technology that powers apps like ChatGPT. Right now, ChatGPT can only reply in text form, but it looks like the imminent update will change all that.
ChatGPT won’t 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
At the AI event, Microsoft explained that GPT-4 would be “multimodal.” Holger Kenn, Director of Business Strategy at Microsoft Germany, explained that this would allow the company’s AI to translate a user’s text into images, music, and video.
Microsoft gave an example of how a call center could use GPT-4 to automatically convert phone conversations between employees and customers into text, which would save huge amounts of time and effort that would previously be expended on summarizing those calls after they finish.
Despite the huge interest and waiting lists, Microsoft didn’t touch on its integration of ChatGPT into its Bing web browser. Given all the recent controversy this has been generating, perhaps the company felt it was too much of a touchy subject.
Regardless, with 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.
