We have seen chatbots like Elon Musk’s Grok and Pi, from DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, prioritise the “personality” of their products, but the way in which GPT-4o seamlessly handled the combination of text, audio and images with an instant response appears to put OpenAI ahead of the competition.

Of course, at the moment we only have the firm’s word for it – it was their demo, carefully curated and managed by them. It will be interesting to see how GPT-4o copes at scale with the millions of people who already use ChatGPT as it rolls out.

OpenAI’s chief technology officer Mira Murati described GPT-4o as “magical” but added that the firm would “remove that mysticism” with the product’s roll-out.

An interesting and emotive choice of words: while this tech is rapidly becoming more sophisticated and increasingly convincing as a companion – it is not sentient or magic, it is complex programming and machine learning.

There have been rumours about a partnership between OpenAI and Apple and while this has not yet been confirmed, it was telling during the presentation that Apple products were used throughout.

Another shot across the bows was the timing of this event, 24 hours before its rival Google is due to show off its latest AI developments at its annual conference, Google IO.