OpenAI's GPT-4 upgrade will let you turn text into video, Microsoft exec says ahead of upcoming release

• A Microsoft executive said OpenAI's new model will be released this week, per a German news outlet.
• GPT-4 will be able to turn text into video, a feature already included in Google and Meta AIs.
• Andreas Braun, the CTO of Microsoft's German business, made the comments on Thursday.

OpenAI's upcoming GPT-4 upgrade will let users turn text into video, Microsoft Germany CTO Andreas Braun said at an AI event last Thursday, as the German publication Heise reported. Microsoft is a leading investor in OpenAI, pumping billions of dollars into the company. 

Braun added that the more powerful AI will be introduced this week, putting an end to speculation over its release. "We will introduce GPT-4 next week, there we will have multimodal models that will offer completely different possibilities – for example, videos," Braun said, per Heise.

Excitement has grown in Silicon Valley over the potential of OpenAI's new model, but CEO Sam Altman told venture capital newsletter StrictlyVC: "People are begging to be disappointed, and they will be."

The OpenAI CTO, Mira Murati, has also said "I think less hype would be good," but added it may "broaden opportunities," per FastCompany.

Meta and Google have already introduced text-to-video capabilities in their own AI, but it marks a step forward for the wildly-popular ChatGPT, which has so far been limited to verbal outputs. 

Microsoft has reportedly invested more than $10 billion into OpenAI, with the partnership key in powering its own Bing chatbot. While the companies say Bing is using the same GPT-3.5 model currently used by OpenAI's trademark chatbot, the New York Times reports it is "very likely" using GPT-4 already.

Since its launch last November, ChatGPT has accrued over 100 million users — beating the time TikTok took to reach the same milestone by seven months.

But OpenAI's management has come under criticism from Elon Musk, who cofounded the company before leaving the board in 2018.

"OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it 'Open' AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft," he tweeted last month.

Microsoft and OpenAI did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment, sent outside US working hours.