Introducing GPT‑Live

According to Simon Willison's Weblog, OpenAI has finally overhauled the model behind ChatGPT's voice mode, now branded GPT-Live. The old voice mode ran on a GPT-4o era model with a knowledge cutoff back in twenty twenty-four, which Willison says had grown too weak to be a useful brainstorming partner. The new version can hand off harder questions — web search, deeper reasoning, complex work — to OpenAI's frontier model, currently GPT-5.5, running in the background, and keep the conversation going while it waits for the answer. Willison, who had early preview access, reports one memorable quirk: the model kept interrupting him to laugh at things he hadn't meant as jokes, apparently triggered by a rambling question about where owls hide before dusk. He says OpenAI has since tuned that down. His longest test run was a full hour, chatting while walking the dog.

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