OpenAI has announced two major upgrades to its latest GPT-4 Turbo model as well as its API, just when Alphabet Inc.'s (GOOG  ) (GOOGL  ) Google announced a significant upgrade to its Gemini 1.5 Pro model.

What Happened: Microsoft Corp.-backed (MSFT  ) OpenAI has announced that its GPT-4 Turbo with Vision model is now accessible through its API.

This upgrade, which was previously only available to a select few, is expected to improve the workflow for developers and enhance the efficiency of their applications.

Developers can now use two functionalities in the GPT-4 Turbo API that lets them automate actions within their connected apps, such as sending an email, posting something online, or making a purchase.

In addition to this, OpenAI says its GPT-4 Turbo model has been "majorly improved" just in time for Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro upgrade.

"Majorly improved GPT-4 Turbo model available now in the API and rolling out in ChatGPT."

OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo with Vision has already been put to use by several customers, including Cognition, a startup that relies on the model to automatically generate full code on behalf of users.

Healthify, a health and fitness app, uses the model to provide nutritional analysis and recommendations of photos of meals.

Despite the GPT-4 Turbo model falling behind in benchmark tests to newer models such as Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus and Cohere's Command R+, OpenAI's move to make the GPT-4 Turbo with Vision more accessible to potential enterprise customers and developers is expected to maintain the appeal of OpenAI's models.

Why It Matters: The upgrade of the GPT-4 Turbo with Vision model is a significant development in the AI space.

This move is expected to further solidify OpenAI's position as a leading provider of AI models, despite the competition from other models like Elon Musk's xAI Grok 2 and Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro.

Earlier in April, Microsoft also rolled out priority access to GPT-4 Turbo for business subscribers of its AI-powered Copilot assistant, further highlighting the increasing demand for advanced AI models in the industry.