The researcher at OpenAI behind the company’s voice software announced on Tuesday that he is leaving the company — and joked about creating “Her” in a nod to the controversy surrounding the software.
Alexis Conneau, who spearheaded the GTP-4o software, tweeted: “After an amazing journey at @OpenAI building #Her, I’ve decided to start a new company.”
“More to come soon. Reach out if you’re excited about building something #magical - we’re hiring,” he said, along with a gif from the 2013 movie Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love with an AI software voiced by Scarlett Johansson.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman is known to be a big fan of Johansson’s work, namely the 2013 film Her.
GTP-4o received significant backlash after its debut because the voice sounded so similar to Johansson’s in the movie.
Johansson herself said she had declined to work with the company on the software after they asked. She added that she was “shocked, angered, and in disbelief” that OpenAI nevertheless used an “eerily similar” voice to hers.
“Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system,” Johansson wrote in a statement reported by NPR.
She added that Altman contacted her agent again and asked her to reconsider a partnership just days before the company released a demo of the new ChatGPT voice.
OpenAI later warned users in a report that they could become emotionally attached to its voice if not careful, as GPT-4o’s “human-like, high-fidelity voice” could make the issue of hallucinations, or a model’s tendency to make up fake or nonsensical information, worse.
Conneau didn’t provide many details on what his next project is. When someone on Twitter asked what his artificial general intelligence timeline was, he replied, “I’m more after general emotional intelligence!”