What does Chat GPT-4o mean for publishers?

The latest ChatGPT update released by OpenAI this week has grand implications for publishers. We grabbed a moment with the team to find out what they are most excited by in the new release.

Emma Watkins, Head of Marketing and Communications

"With the free version now able to search the internet, providing links and citations to answers, Google's search page is looking less and less relevant for publishers to prioritise, let alone their own landing pages. Following the leaked 'Preferred Publisher Program' pitch decks from OpenAI where they offer "richer brand expression" in chat conversations to those who pay for the privilege, it seems the decision for Publishers as to whether or not to partner with OpenAI is becoming more and more urgent with the clear strategy from OpenAI to get everyone using ChatGPT to power their fact-finding missions - everything from which restaurants to eat at to which papers to cite in their next research article..."

Simon Epstein, Head of Technical Consultancy

"The enhanced multi modal capabilities are really interesting - there is a lot of valuable information locked up within figures in research papers.? Manually annotating figures has produced rich datasets (see https://sourcedata.embo.org/) and usingGen AI as a first pass could help scale up these efforts."

Will Bailey, Head of Partnerships

"The integration and accessibility of the multi-modal capabilities are the most interesting bit for me, too. This feels like the moment that video, image, speech and audio - data experienced in any way, really - can truly become part of the knowledge economy because everyone can now experiment with something that's never really been possible before."

Jennifer Schivas, CEO

"The pace of behaviour shift from search to conversation, including text, audio and video, in real (interruptible!) time is the most exciting thing. From my own perspective, my behaviours have changed considerably in the last 18 months, and barriers to certain tasks have dropped and allowed me to be much more effective, faster. For publishers, the need to evolve from serving the traditional 'keyword search to find documents' user journey to users asking questions, getting answers and then continuing to refine the output with further conversation will require deep thought and potentially a reworking of the way their content and data is stored, tagged and connected."

David Leeming, CTO

"The image-related search capabilities are potentially very interesting. While Google and other providers have long had the ability for users to start with an image to power a search engine result, pairing this with the power of Chat GPT-4o to not just give links but insights and answers has wide implications for any industries where there is a lot of information held in images and figures. I'm thinking specifically of medical diagrams and research figures, but the possibilities are endless. A more mundane example is that I'm currently using it to help me design my garden, and identify what plants are weeds, and how to care for the plants I want to keep. Simple, but incredibly powerful."

Claire Jackson, Head of Product Delivery

"I'm excited about the enhanced translation capabilities offered by ChatGPT-4o, with the increased potential to transform information translation and dissemination. Anything that supports crucial insights reaching the people who can most benefit from it will bridge gaps and make valuable information more accessible to everyone. Exciting times ahead for knowledge sharing!"