Skip to main content

This massive upgrade to ChatGPT is coming in January — and it’s not GPT-5

ChatGPT on a laptop
Hatice Baran / Pexels

OpenAI is set to launch a new AI agent in January, code-named Operator, that will enable ChatGPT to take action on the user’s behalf. You may never have to book your own flights ever again.

The company’s leadership made the announcement during a staff meeting Wednesday, reports Bloomberg. The company plans to roll out the new feature as a research preview through the company’s developer API.

Recommended Videos

AI agents differ significantly from traditional programs. Rather than follow a set of predefined instructions, agents can autonomously perceive their environment, process information, and make decisions to perform tasks or solve problems, such as generating complex computer code or booking travel arrangements.

OpenAI is not alone in its efforts. Anthropic recently released its Computer Control feature, which enables the model to manipulate a desktop environment in the same way human users would. Microsoft similarly unveiled its AI agent feature in late October. It’s designed to handle monotonous office work like managing employee records and drafting emails. Google is also working on AI agents of its own, code-named Jarvis, and could preview it by the end of the year.

“We will have better and better models,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote during a Reddit AMA  session last month. “But I think the thing that will feel like the next giant breakthrough will be agents.” According to Bloomberg’s sources, OpenAI is working on multiple styles of AI agent, with the most production-ready version being a general assistant that will be able to take action through a web browser.

The announcement comes as leading AI developers face severe diminishing returns to the rate of their frontier models’ advancement and skyrocketing energy and water requirements. The hope here, apparently, is that if developers can’t simply brute force the upcoming GPT-5 model into better performance metrics, they’ll make them more useful instead.

Andrew Tarantola
Andrew Tarantola is a journalist with more than a decade reporting on emerging technologies ranging from robotics and machine…
ChatGPT already listens and speaks. Soon it may see as well
ChatGPT meets a dog

ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode, which allows users to converse with the chatbot in real time, could soon gain the gift of sight, according to code discovered in the platform's latest beta build. While OpenAI has not yet confirmed the specific release of the new feature, code in the ChatGPT v1.2024.317 beta build spotted by Android Authority suggests that the so-called "live camera" could be imminently forthcoming.

OpenAI had first shown off Advanced Voice Mode's vision capabilities for ChatGPT in May, when the feature was first launched in alpha. During a demo posted at the time, the system was able to identify that it was looking at a dog through the phone's camera feed, identify the dog based on past interactions, recognize the dog's ball, and associate the dog's relationship to the ball (i.e. playing fetch).

Read more
This open-source alternative to ChatGPT just got serious
The beta Canvas feature on Mistral

French AI startup Mistral announced Monday that it is incorporating a half-dozen new features and capabilities into its free generative AI work assistant, dubbed le Chat (French for "the cat"), that will put the open-source chatbot on par with leading frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Le Chat can now search the web and provide cited sources, similar to what Perplexity and SearchGPT both offer. Mistral's chatbot now also offers a Canvas feature akin to Claude's Artifacts where users can modify and edit content and code. What's more, le Chat can now generate images thanks to an integration with Black Forest Labs' Flux Pro, the same image generator that powers Grok-2's capabilities.

Read more
Is AI already plateauing? New reporting suggests GPT-5 may be in trouble
A person sits in front of a laptop. On the laptop screen is the home page for OpenAI's ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot.

OpenAI's next-generation Orion model of ChatGPT, which is both rumored and denied to be arriving by the end of the year, may not be all it's been hyped to be once it arrives, according to a new report from The Information.

Citing anonymous OpenAI employees, the report claims the Orion model has shown a "far smaller" improvement over its GPT-4 predecessor than GPT-4 showed over GPT-3. Those sources also note that Orion "isn’t reliably better than its predecessor [GPT-4] in handling certain tasks," specifically coding applications, though the new model is notably stronger at general language capabilities, such as summarizing documents or generating emails.

Read more