The hottest AI technology foundation, OpenAI’s GPT, got a big upgrade Tuesday that’s now available in the premium version of the ChatGPT chatbot.
The new GPT-4 can generate much longer strings of text, respond when people feed it images and is designed to do a better job avoiding artificial intelligence pitfalls visible in the earlier GPT-3.5, OpenAI said Tuesday. For example, when taking bar exams that attorneys must pass to practice law, GPT-4 ranks in the top 10% of scores compared to the bottom 10% for GPT-3.5, the AI research company said.
GPT stands for Generative Pretrained Transformer, a reference to the fact that it can generate text on its own and that it uses an AI technology called transformers that Google pioneered. It’s a type of AI called a large language model that’s trained on vast swaths of data harvested from the internet, learning mathematically to spot patterns and reproduce styles.
OpenAI has made its GPT technology available to developers for years, but ChatGPT offered an easy interface that yielded an explosion of interest, experimentation, and worry about the downsides of the technology.
OpenAI got another boost when Microsoft said in February it’s using GPT technology in its Bing search engine, including a chat features similar to ChatGPT. On Tuesday, Microsoft said it’s using GPT-4 for the Bing work. Together, OpenAI and Microsoft pose a major search threat to Google, but Google has its own large language model technology too, including a chatbot called Bard that Google is testing privately.
