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As Uber continues its mission of bringing more electric vehicles into its service, it has introduced an AI assistant powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o to help drivers get answers to EV questions.
On Tuesday (October 8) when the company shared the partnership at its Go-Get event and through its newsroom, writing: “Going electric is a big decision, and drivers have lots of questions.
“That’s why we’re announcing an AI Assistant in the driver app – powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o – to help drivers get answers to every EV question under the sun.”
Uber signed off the announcement by writing that the feature will be “coming soon.”
Through this integration with OpenAI’s newest flagship model, drivers will be able to use the assistant through the usual app where they can then ask questions like ‘Why should I switch to an electric vehicle,’ ‘Which EVs are most affordable?’ or anything else that crosses their mind.
The software that will be used, GPT-4o, is a multimodal generative pre-trained transformer which is a type of large language model (LLM) that can reason, understand, and answer key questions amongst other uses.
Uber’s OpenAI adoption rumored to go public in early 2025
While the partnership will only be utilized for drivers to begin with, an Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch that this could potentially span into other use cases in the future.
They also said that “drivers will eventually be able to speak directly to the chatbot, in addition to sending text-based questions.” The chatbot could be able to audibly respond to driver queries.
The actual details aren’t yet known including which languages will be supported. The LLM GPT-4o works with over 50 languages.
Although the news marks a major partnership with two giants – Uber and OpenAI – the information around the AI Assistant was just a small part of the car services’ event.
It was here that Uber gave an update on its goal it shared four years ago when it said it wished to “transform Uber into a zero-emissions platform by 2040.” The company said there is still “lots of work ahead” but detailed that today “that vision is picking up speed.”
Featured Image: Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
