OpenAI on Monday launched a new AI model and desktop version of ChatGPT, along with an updated user interface, the company’s latest effort to expand use of its popular chatbot.
The update brings GPT-4 to everyone, including OpenAI’s free users, technology chief Mira Murati said in a livestreamed event. She added that the new model, GPT-4o, is “much faster,” with improved capabilities in text, video and audio.
“This is the first time that we are really making a huge step forward when it comes to the ease of use,” Murati said.
OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, has been valued by more than $80 billion by investors. The company, founded in 2015, is under pressure to stay on top of the generative AI market while finding ways to make money as it spends massive sums on processors and infrastructure to build and train its models.
The new model also has improved quality and speed of ChatGPT for 50 different languages, and it will also be available via OpenAI’s API so that developers can begin building applications using the new model today, Murati said. GPT-4o is twice as fast as, and half the cost of, GPT-4 Turbo, Murati said.
OpenAI team members demonstrated the new model’s audio capabilities, asking for help calming down ahead of a public speech. OpenAI researcher Mark Chen said the model has the capability to “perceive your emotion,” adding that the model can also handle users interrupting it. The team also asked it to analyze a user’s facial expression to comment on the emotions the person may be experiencing.
“Hey there, what’s up? How can I brighten your day today?” ChatGPT’s audio mode said when a user greeted it.
Chen demonstrated the model’s ability to tell a bedtime story and asked it to change the tone of its voice to be more dramatic or robotic. He even asked it to sing the story.
OpenAI’s new model can also function as a translator, even in audio mode, the company said. Chen demonstrated the tool’s ability to listen to Murati speaking Italian while he spoke English and to translate into their respective languages as they conversed.
Team members also demonstrated the model’s ability to solve math equations and help write code, positioning it as a stronger competitor to Microsoft’s own GitHub Copilot.
For OpenAI, it’s one of the company’s biggest announcements since its August launch of ChatGPT Enterprise, the AI chatbot’s business tier. That tool was in development for “under a year” and had the help of more than 20 companies of varying sizes and industries, OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap told CNBC at the time.
OpenAI, Microsoft and Google are at the helm of a generative AI gold rush as companies in seemingly every industry race to add AI-powered chatbots and agents to key services to avoid being left behind by competitors. Earlier this month, OpenAI rival Anthropic announced its first-ever enterprise offering and a free iPhone app.
A record $29.1 billion was invested across nearly 700 generative AI deals in 2023, an increase of more than 260% from the prior year, according to PitchBook. The market is predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.
Some in the industry have raised concerns about the speed at which untested new services are coming to market, and academics and ethicists are distressed about the technology’s tendency to propagate bias.
After ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022, it broke records at the time as the fastest-growing consumer app in history, and now has about 100 million weekly active users. OpenAI says that more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies are using the platform.
Murati said during the Monday event that OpenAI wants to “remove some of the mysticism from the technology.”
“Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out these capabilities to everyone,” Murati said, adding.
She concluded by thanking Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and his company for providing the necessary graphics processing units (GPUs) to power OpenAI’s technology.
“I just want to thank the incredible OpenAI team, and also thanks to Jensen and the Nvidia team for bringing us the most advanced GPUs to make this demo possible today,” she said.
Elon Musk looks on as U.S. President Donald Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 21, 2025.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
The Elon Musk-owned social media platform X experienced a brief outage on Saturday morning, with tens of thousands of users reportedly unable to use the site.
About 25,000 users reported issues with the platform, according to the analytics platform Downdetector, which gathers data from users to monitor issues with various platforms.
Roughly 21,000 users reported issues just after 8:30 a.m. ET, per the analytics platform.
The issues appeared to be largely resolved by around 9:55 a.m., when about 2,000 users were reporting issues with the platform.
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X did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Additional information on the outage was not available.
Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla, acquired X, formerly known as Twitter in 2022.
The site has had a number of widespread outages since the acquisition.
Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.
Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images
Businesses are turning to artificial intelligence tools to help them navigate real-world turbulence in global trade.
Several tech firms told CNBC say they’re deploying the nascent technology to visualize businesses’ global supply chains — from the materials that are used to form products, to where those goods are being shipped from — and understand how they’re affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.
Last week, Salesforce said it had developed a new import specialist AI agent that can “instantly process changes for all 20,000 product categories in the U.S. customs system and then take action on them” as needed, to help navigate changes to tariff systems.
Engineers at the U.S. software giant used the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a 4,400-page document of tariffs on goods imported to the U.S., to inform answers generated by the agent.
“The sheer pace and complexity of global tariff changes make it nearly impossible for most businesses to keep up manually,” Eric Loeb, executive vice president of government affairs at Salesforce, told CNBC. “In the past, companies might have relied on small teams of in-house experts to keep pace.”
Firms say that AI systems are enabling them to take decisions on adjustments to their global supply chains much faster.
Andrew Bell, chief product officer of supply chain management software firm Kinaxis, said that manufacturers and distributors looking to inform their response to tariffs are using his firm’s machine learning technology to assess their products and the materials that go into them, as well as external signals like news articles and macroeconomic data.
“With that information, we can start doing some of those simulations of, here is a particular part that is in your build material that has a significant tariff. If you switched to using this other part instead, what would the impact be overall?” Bell told CNBC.
‘AI’s moment to shine’
Trump’s tariffs list — which covers dozens of countries — has forced companies to rethink their supply chains and pricing, with the likes of Walmart and Nikealready raising prices on some products. The U.S. imported about $3.3 trillion of goods in 2024, according to census data.
Uncertainty from the U.S. tariff measures “actually probably presents AI’s moment to shine,” Zack Kass, a futurist and former head of OpenAI’s go-to-market strategy, told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy last month.
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“If you wonder how hard things could get without AI vis-a-vis automation, and what would happen in a world where you can’t just employ a bunch of people overnight, AI presents this alternative proposal,” he added.
Nagendra Bandaru, managing partner and global head of technology services at Indian IT giant Wipro, said clients are using the company’s agentic AI solutions “to pivot supplier strategies, adjust trade lanes, and manage duty exposure dynamically as policy landscapes evolve.”
Wipro says it uses a range of AI systems — both proprietary and supplied by third parties — from large language models to traditional machine learning and computer vision techniques to inspect physical assets in cross-border transit.
‘Not a silver bullet’
While it preferred to keep company names confidential, Wipro said that firms using its AI products to navigate Trump’s tariffs range from a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer with factories in Asia to an automotive parts supplier exporting to Europe and North America.
“AI is a powerful enabler — but not a silver bullet,” Bandaru told CNBC. “It doesn’t replace trade policy strategy, it enhances it by transforming global trade from a reactive challenge into a proactive, data-driven advantage.”
AI was already a key investment priority for global firms prior to Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements on April. Nearly three-quarters of business leaders ranked AI and generative AI in their top three technologies for investment in 2025, according to a report by Capgemini published in January.
“There are a number of ways AI can assist companies dealing with the tariffs and resulting uncertainty. But any AI solution’s success will be predicated on the quality of the data it has access to,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, told CNBC.
The venture capitalist said that one of his portfolio companies, FourKites, uses supply chain network data with AI to help firms understand the logistics impacts of adjusting suppliers due to tariffs.
“They are working with a number of Fortune 500 companies to leverage their agents for freight and ocean to provide this level of visibility and intelligence,” Agarwal said.
“Switching suppliers may reduce tariffs costs, but might increase lead times and transportation costs,” he added. “In addition, the volatility of the tariffs [has] severely impacted the rates and capacity available in both the ocean and the domestic freight networks.”
A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon‘s Zoox robotaxi unit issued a voluntary recall of its software for the second time in a month following a recent crash in San Francisco.
On May 8, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi was turning at low speed when it was struck by an electric scooter rider after braking to yield at an intersection. The person on the scooter declined medical attention after sustaining minor injuries as a result of the collision, Zoox said.
“The Zoox vehicle was stopped at the time of contact,” the company said in a blog post. “The e-scooterist fell to the ground directly next to the vehicle. The robotaxi then began to move and stopped after completing the turn, but did not make further contact with the e-scooterist.”
Zoox said it submitted a voluntary software recall report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday.
A Zoox spokesperson said the notice should be published on the NHTSA website early next week. The recall affected 270 vehicles, the spokesperson said.
The NHTSA said in a statement it had received the recall notice and that the agency “advises road users to be cautious in the vicinity of vehicles because drivers may incorrectly predict the travel path of a cyclist or scooter rider or come to an unexpected stop.”
If an autonomous vehicle continues to move after contact with any nearby vulnerable road user, it risks causing harm or further harm. In the AV industry, General Motors-backed Cruise exited the robotaxi business after a collision in which one of its vehicles injured a pedestrian who had been struck by a human-driven car and was then rolled over by the Cruise AV.
Zoox’s May incident comes roughly two weeks after the company announced a separate voluntary software recall following a recent Las Vegas crash. In that incident, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, resulting in minor damage to both vehicles.
The company issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis in order to address a defect with its automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing the “risk of a crash.”
Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for more than $1 billion, announcing at the time that the deal would help bring the self-driving technology company’s “vision for autonomous ride-hailing to reality.”
While Zoox is in a testing and development stage with its AVs on public roads in the U.S., Alphabet’s Waymo is already operating commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and is ramping up in Atlanta.
Teslais promising it will launch its long-delayed robotaxis in Austin next month, and, if all goes well, plans to expand after that to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.