OpenAI recently released GPT-4, a major upgrade of the AI language model and successor to the ChatGPT model used in ChatGPT, a wildly popular natural language processing tool. This successor comes with improved capabilities, such as the capacity to take in visual inputs, and generate more complex and longer pieces of text. Additionally, it displays more reliable common sense reasoning. It has since been deployed in a variety of applications, including those offered by Duolingo, Khan Academy, Morgan Stanley, Stripe and the Icelandic government.
OpenAI, a San Francisco-based AI research company, was founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, alongside other investors including Microsoft co-founder Peter Thiel. This company made its name when it released the AI language model GPT-3.5. Widely recognized as a milestone in NLP, GPT-3.5 drastically expanded the roles of generative AI and its multi-modal capabilities, allowing it to take in visual inputs and respond more intelligently.
GPT-4, the latest iteration of this language model, takes AI to even greater heights. It has more advanced reasoning and carries out more creative tasks, such as interpretation of images, explanation of visual humour, and more. It has also undergone a rigorous process of human feedback-based fine-tuning, making it better able to ensure a reliable and responsible output, according to the OpenAI technical report.
On the other hand, it has been argued that the GPT-4 model is actually largely similar to GPT-3.5, and thus not a “groundbreaking” development in AI. It has not made any conceptual leaps, and its improvements of performance and capabilities are mostly only incremental. There is much research to be done in order to bridge the gap between human-level intelligence and the capabilities of current AI models.
The debate around GPT-4 is expected to continue, as more applications leveraging the power of this model become available. Despite this, the development and deployment of GPT-4 marks a significant step forward for NLP and generative AI technology, and a milestone for OpenAI.