Ahead of OpenAI’s livestream announcing GPT-4o and the desktop app, upbeat music can be both anxiety-inducing and soothing, along with the sounds of raindrops and ticking clocks. This is an apt representation of the dichotomy between what OpenAI does and how it presents itself to the world.
And, from the choice of presenters to the friendly atmosphere—including the soothing voice of GPT-4o, a female who sounds like a kind kindergarten teacher—the message of the OpenAI event is: “We are your friends; Your friends; we’re your friends. We’re not like other tech companies; let us help you. All of this seems like a very intentional choice to position the company as a trustworthy AI maker, though ( or may be due to ongoing concerns about copyright infringement, job displacement and misinformation risks.
From the beginning, the event was designed to be non-threatening and intimate. First, it’s led by chief technology officer Mira Murati, not CEO Sam Altman. Mulati, a talented and beautiful technical chief, has been largely uncontroversial. Her promotion to CEO after a brief appointment helped fuel Sam Altman’s coup, but she maintained her support for Altman and represented a voice of stability amid the chaos.
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Mulati is the perfect choice to lead this event. Wearing casual jeans and a perfect blowout, she exudes trust and confidence, easily addressing ethical and safety concerns with a reassuring but vague disclaimer:
In terms of security, GPT-4o has given us new challenges because we’re dealing with real-time audio, real-time visuals, and our team has been working hard to figure out how to mitigate abuse. We continue to work with diverse stakeholders across government, media, entertainment, all industries, red teamers and civil society on how best to bring these technologies to the world.
This was followed by a live demonstration by research leaders Mark Chen and Barret Zoph. Sitting with Murati on comfy chairs, surrounded by wood paneling and plants, the trio looked like friends having a casual conversation in a natural, organic setting. Of course, this is all offset by a fully synthetic technology capable of recreating human voices that can speak, express emotions, sing, and even interrupt on the fly.
Mix and match speed of light
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Speaking of comfy chairs, the whole effect is very different from the usual big tech events. At Google and Apple events, you’ll typically see keynote speakers standing on a giant stage speaking in hyperbole and absolute terms. OpenAI does not have these today. Instead, the event was the opposite of what we expected at Google I/O on Tuesday. All of this is to say, “We’re not like everyone else. You can trust us.”
Chen humanizes herself by admitting she’s nervous. The non-human entity GTP-4o guided him through breathing exercises to calm him down. It all seems designed to convince viewers that new technology has nothing to fear, as if GPT-4o is meant to calm us all down.
“The original idea when we started OpenAI was that we would create artificial intelligence and use it to create various benefits for the world,” Altman said in a blog post after the event. “On the contrary, it seems now We will create artificial intelligence, and then other people will use it to create all kinds of amazing things that will benefit us all.”
But the dystopian visuals of the reassuring and energetic robot voices were not lost on viewers. GPT-4o’s voice was quickly compared to that of the voice assistant that Scarlett Johansson’s character Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with in the movie she.Ultraman even seems to be getting in on the joke Tweet “She” during the presentation. So when he released his altruistic vision for OpenAI, he jokingly compared GPT-4o to a science-fiction technology that usurps the human connection.
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OpenAI has been saying one thing and doing another for some time. Its mission is to “ensure general artificial intelligence benefits all humanity,” but the company has been accused of using content scraped from the web to train its AI models without credit or compensation.It announced the launch of Sora, an artificial intelligence video generator, as a tool to bring creative visions to life, but it still hasn’t revealed what the model was trained on, though many people doubt It’s scraped from YouTube and other videos on the web.
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The company continues to release technology without transparency about how it was created, but throughout the process, Altman and OpenAI have maintained that they are deploying generative artificial intelligence for the sake of regulation and security.
The message is that the public should blindly trust what OpenAI is doing. Today’s event embodies this approach with its warm wood tones, levity and laughter. Whether we believe it or not is another matter.
