ChatGPT, the revolutionary chatbot powered by artificial intelligence (AI), will soon be able to do much more than send human-like text messages. A Microsoft executive has revealed that the next version - set to be released this week - will be able to turn text prompts into unique videos. The tech giant has invested heavily in ChatGPT, and has already unveiled a host of new products which incorporate it as an AI assistant, like search engine Bing. But this updated version, dubbed GPT-4 and tipped to launch on Thursday, will have'multimodal models', according to Microsoft Germany CTO Andreas Braun. This means that it will be able to generate content in multiple formats, like audio clips, images and video clips, from a text prompt.

Although the effect is rather crude, the system offers an early glimpse of what's coming next for generative artificial intelligence, and it is the next obvious step from the text-to-image AI systems that have caused huge excitement this year. Meta's announcement of Make-A-Video, which is not yet being made available to the public, will likely prompt other AI labs to release their own versions. It also raises some big ethical questions. In the last month alone, AI lab OpenAI has made its latest text-to-image AI system DALL-E available to everyone, and AI startup Stability.AI launched Stable Diffusion, an open-source text-to-image system. But text-to-video AI comes with some even greater challenges.