ChatGPT's GPT-4o Model: Capabilities and Limitations in AI Advancement

8 Things ChatGPT Still Can't Do

Quick Links Remember Every Previous Conversation Interact With Your Devices Generate Images Using Negative Prompts Create Images of Copyright Characters or Famous People Identify a Person From an Image Be Your Personal Assistant (Yet) Access Paywalled Content Get Everything Right ChatGPT is an incredibly useful tool when used in the right way. However, despite OpenAI continuing to improve and update the AI chatbot, there are still plenty of things that it can't do. 1 Remember Every Previous Conversation ChatGPT does have a memory, but it is fairly limited. It will remember things that it thinks are important, such as details about you and your preferences or how you've asked for prompts to be answered. You can also ask ChatGPT to remember specific things. However, the memory is finite, so you can't get ChatGPT to remember everything. It means that if you've said something in one conversation, ChatGPT may be completely unaware of it in another conversation. If you create Projects in ChatGPT, each one has its own custom instructions that you can use to store important information, but if you ask it to remember something, this gets saved to the general memory rather than that specific project. 2 Interact With Your Devices There are times when you wish that ChatGPT could interact with your devices. For example, Siri can control your iPhone or Mac to do things such as play music, turn off Bluetooth, or call a contact. However, even with Siri integrated with ChatGPT in Apple Intelligence, there's no way to get ChatGPT to ask Siri to make changes to your device. Anthropic has a beta feature for its Claude chatbot called Computer Use that can take control of your computer and do things such as looking at the screen, entering text, moving the cursor around the screen, and clicking buttons. Thus far, however, ChatGPT is stuck firmly within its own app and can't interact with your device. 3 Generate Images Using Negative Prompts This isn't just a problem with images; AI chatbots tend to struggle with negative prompts in general. It's like when someone tells you not to think of an elephant; that's the first thing that pops into your head. The trouble is, even if you try to make your image generation prompts to be positive, it rarely works. Here's an example: try asking ChatGPT to generate an image of Santa with a mustache but no beard. It draws a beard every time. Change the prompt to something positive, such as "with a mustache and a clean-shaven chin and jaw," and ChatGPT still includes the beard. I've tried many different prompts to try and get ChatGPT to create an image of Santa with a mustache but no beard, and the only way I've found that vaguely worked was to ask it to create an image of Hercules Poirot dressed as Santa. Even then, it looked very obviously like a Belgian detective dressed up rather than the actual Santa without a beard. 4 Create Images of Copyright Characters or Famous People Another thing that ChatGPT can't do is generate images that contain famous people or copyrighted characters, such as cartoon characters or characters from shows or movies. If you ask ChatGPT to generate an image of Mickey Mouse ice skating, for example, you get a written response that it's unable to do so due to content restrictions. This is true of many AI chatbots, with the notable exception of Grok, the AI chatbot for X Premium+ subscribers, which lets you generate images of anyone you want. You can use Elon Musk's app to generate photorealistic images of Elon Musk himself if you want, although whether you would want to is another story. 5 Identify a Person From an Image In the same way that ChatGPT can't create images of famous people, it also won't try to identify them either. For example, you can upload an image of a bird, and ChatGPT will be able to tell you what species of bird it is. However, if you try the same thing with a person, ChatGPT will tell you that it can't identify people in images. Even if the image is of a character from a movie rather than a real person, it will still refuse to identify them. 6 Be Your Personal Assistant (Yet) ChatGPT has made the first steps in trying to become an agentic AI. Standard AI chatbots will respond to prompts but won't take action on their own. Agentic AI can make decisions and perform actions without being prompted, effectively working autonomously to achieve a specific goal. ChatGPT added the Tasks feature, which is the first time that the AI chatbot has been able to act without having to be directly prompted. You can use Tasks to perform actions on a schedule, even when you don't have the app open. However, in its current form, Tasks in ChatGPT isn't quite good enough for the app to take over as your all-in-one AI-powered personal assistant just yet. There's a limit of 10 scheduled tasks, which is too few to be of much use, and the scheduled actions don't always work as they should. However, this is definitely a step in the right direction. 7 Access Paywalled Content ChatGPT's models were trained on data from the internet, and initially, this meant that they could only provide information up to a specific cut-off date. Anything that happened after that date wasn't part of the training data, and so ChatGPT didn't know about it. However, ChatGPT is now able to search the internet, so it can find up-to-date information online. There's one major exception, however. If the site is paywalled, ChatGPT won't be able to access the content, so if the information you need is on a paywalled site, ChatGPT isn't going to be able to track it down. 8 Get Everything Right ChatGPT can be insanely useful; I use it multiple times a day for all sorts of different things. However, it still suffers from something that currently plagues all AI chatbots: it doesn't always get everything right. You have to be really careful that you don't take everything that ChatGPT tells you as gospel because it's still the case that, at times, it will completely hallucinate answers that can sound very convincing. I use ChatGPT to search How-To Geek's articles because the results using ChatGPT's natural language processing are usually far superior to those found by the built-in keyword-based search feature. However, it doesn't always work. Just today, it got stuck in a loop where I would ask it to search for articles from the website on a specific topic, and it would state that there were none. When I asked it to check again, it would then find them all. This kept repeating for every topic I asked about. In the past, ChatGPT has completely made up articles and even provided fake web links to those articles that only proved to be made up when I tried to open them. You still need to be on guard for ChatGPT giving you information that simply isn't true. I love ChatGPT. I use it all the time, and most of the time, it proves to be incredibly helpful. However, it still has some significant limitations, with the list above only scratching the surface. As long as you are aware of what ChatGPT can and can't do, you can use it for things it's capable of and find other ways to do the things that it can't.

7 of the Best Use Cases for ChatGPT's GPT-4o Model

Quick Links Ask GPT-4o to Search the Web Use GPT-4o to Generate Images Choose GPT-4o for Advanced Voice Turn to GPT-4o for Creative Tasks Use GPT-4o for Translation Make GPT-4o Your Personal Assistant Use GPT-4o For Projects ChatGPT offers multiple AI models, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. The most versatile model is probably GPT-4o, which is the best choice for a wide range of uses. 7 Ask GPT-4o to Search the Web One of the most useful features of the GPT-4o model is that it can search the web, something that the o1 model isn't able to do. However, GPT-4o is much more useful than simply a direct replacement for Google. That's because GPT-4o can use natural language processing to search for the intent of your query, rather than simply the keywords that it contains. It means that GPT-4o can find answers that traditional search engines can't and allows GPT-4o to answer the type of queries that I've been wishing search engines could answer for years. For example, you can't remember the name of a TV show you watched. You know it was written by and starred an actress who was in another TV show, but you can't remember what that show was called either. However, you can remember that one of the actors in it was Tom Hanks' son. If you ask Google "What's the name of that tv show written by and starring the woman who is in that other show with tom hanks son with all the couples," the top result is Bosom Buddies, a TV series from 1980 starring Tom Hanks. None of the results on the first page are of any use, and I got as far as the fifth page of results before giving up looking for one that could help. Close Stick the same query into GPT-4o and hit the globe icon to make ChatGPT search the web, and I get exactly the answer I was looking for. GPT-4o was able to understand my rambling query and find the information I needed by searching the web. 6 Use GPT-4o to Generate Images One of the things that impressed me most when AI burst onto the scene a few years back was the ability to generate images. It blew my mind that simply by asking, generative AI could create an image that had never existed before, such as a bald spaceman riding a pig. Initially, you needed to use dedicated apps or services to generate images, but image generation is now baked into GPT-4o, meaning you can ask ChatGPT to generate an image directly within a chat. Close The beauty is that if the image doesn't turn out quite like you hoped, you can add refinements to it just by explaining them to ChatGPT, without having to write out a new prompt from scratch. It doesn't always work as you'd hope (try getting ChatGPT to create an image of Santa without a beard, for example) but it's a quick and easy way to produce almost any image you could ever imagine. 5 Choose GPT-4o for Advanced Voice When ChatGPT first introduced a voice mode, it was reasonably good. You could have a back-and-forth conversation, although the responses would sometimes take a while to come back. If you wanted to interrupt ChatGPT, you'd have to tap the screen, which didn't really make it feel like you were having a genuine conversation. Advanced Voice takes things to a whole new level. The responses are almost instantaneous, and the speech model is so good that you really do feel like you're talking to a real person at times. The real proof of how good Advanced Voice is was when my daughter was stuck for ideas of what to do during recess. She had a long back-and-forth with ChatGPT in Advanced Voice mode and was able to get some excellent ideas. She had absolutely zero issues with getting the information she wanted; for her, it was just like talking to a real person. To access Advanced Voice, open a chat, select the GPT-4o model, and tap the sound wave icon. You'll need to be a Plus, Pro, or Team subscriber to get full access to Advanced Voice, but If you're a free user, you can access a preview of about 15 minutes each month or use Standard Voice. 4 Turn to GPT-4o for Creative Tasks If creativity has never been your strong point, GPT-4o can really help. Generative AI models are very good at creative tasks, and the results can be truly impressive. For example, do you need a story about a monkey with narcolepsy that solves crimes in downtown New York? Just ask ChatGPT, and it will knock one out for you in seconds. I can recommend the book Benny the Blue Whale by Andy Stanton for an interesting read; he uses ChatGPT to write an entire (hilarious and NSFW) story about a blue whale with a magical appendage and discusses ChatGPT's failures and successes as he goes. Close Stories aren't all that GPT-4o can write. You can create original poetry that mimics the style of your favorite poet, generate lyrics for a song, or write dialog for a movie script. There are plenty of other creative uses, too. You could create character descriptions for a novel, create puzzles to build into a video game, generate social media copy, ask for creative writing prompts, produce a list of gift ideas, and so much more. I even use GPT-4o to recommend new books, movies, music, and TV shows, and I've discovered some excellent new stuff by following its recommendations. 3 Use GPT-4o for Translation GPT-4o is also multilingual. If you want to translate something to or from a different language, just ask ChatGPT and it will do it for you almost instantly. You can even ask ChatGPT to use cultural idioms or tone to make your translation seem like it was written by a native speaker. The multimodal capabilities of GPT-4o mean that you can translate directly from images, too. I had some peanut butter from Holland that I was given as a gift. There was a lot of writing on the label, so I took a photo and ChatGPT translated it for me in an instant. You can even use Advanced Voice to practice your conversational skills in another language. I have ChatGPT speak to me in Italian, and I have to respond in the same language. I gave instructions that if I make an error, ChatGPT should correct me, but in a gentle way so as not to hurt my feelings. It's far less daunting than trying to speak to a real person and is a genuinely useful way to practice speaking a foreign language. 2 Make GPT-4o Your Personal Assistant GPT-4o continues to gain new features. One of the newer features is Tasks, which allows you to create prompts that are acted upon at scheduled times. For example, you can ask to be reminded about doing some Italian conversation practice every weekday at 6 pm, and ChatGPT will do so. Using scheduled tasks isn't perfect, and it won't replace your to-do app just yet, but it's a step in the right direction towards ChatGPT becoming a truly useful personal assistant. You can get reminders, generate creative writing prompts every day, or just be woken up with a positive message and an amusing AI-generated image. You can even get ChatGPT to remember things that you can ask about at a later date. I'm using the feature to remember where I've put items that I only rarely use, to save me from wasting hours hunting them down whenever I need them. 1 Use GPT-4o For Projects Another recent feature added to GPT-4o is Projects. At first glance, it seems like a fairly basic feature that lets you place your conversations into folders to keep them better organized. However, two additional features make Projects really useful. Firstly, you can upload files that all chats in the Project can access. For example, you can upload a PDF of the instruction manual for your new camera. In any chat within that project, you can ask a question such as how to change the autofocus mode, and ChatGPT will be able to pull the information from the manual. Secondly, you can create custom instructions that only apply to chats within your Project. This effectively allows you to create multiple personalized versions of ChatGPT that do specific things. For example, I have a Project with instructions to take anything I enter as a prompt and to search for it on the How-To Geek website, which is a much quicker and more effective way of finding all the articles on a specific topic than using the search feature on the website. ChatGPT has multiple different models available, but currently, GPT-4o is the most versatile. You can use it for everything from generating images and writing stories to practicing your language skills and managing your tasks. While some models, such as the o1 model, are superior at complex problem-solving tasks, GPT-4o is usually my go-to model for most of the queries I enter in ChatGPT.