Sam Altman has found himself using GPT-4o in a 'surprisingly cool' way while working

• OpenAI announced its latest flagship model, GPT-4o, on Monday.
• CEO Sam Altman says he's found a helpful way to use the AI while working.
• He says it helps him stay on task without needing to switch between tabs to look things up.

OpenAI's newest AI model, GPT-4o, has been out for less than a week, and people can use it for everything from providing translations in real time to quite literally reading the room to answer questions based on physical surroundings.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has also found it helpful in another way, as he outlined during an episode of the podcast The Logan Bartlett Show published Tuesday.

"I've only had it for like a week or something," he said, but one way of using it is "putting my phone on the table while I'm really in the zone of working, and then, without having to change windows or change what I'm doing, using it as like another channel," he said.

He elaborated, "So I'm working on something, I would normally stop what I'm doing, switch to another tab, Google something, click around or whatever, but while I'm still doing it, to just ask and get an instant response without changing from what I was looking at on my computer, that's been a surprisingly cool thing."

Altman, who has mostly run OpenAI since 2019, also spoke on the podcast about how becoming one of tech's most recognizable figures has cost him his privacy around San Francisco, saying he can no longer dine out in public in the city.

"It's a strangely isolating way to live," he said.

Altman also discussed his brief ousting from OpenAI last year. He said he lived in an "adrenaline-charged state" during the handful of days following his firing before he was ultimately brought back as CEO.