UNITED STATES 

NEWS ANALYSIS

OpenAI unveils GPT-4, a new foundation for ChatGPT

GPT-4 promises to open up new use cases for OpenAI's chatbot technology, enabling visual and
audio inputs.

By Lucas Mearian
Senior Reporter, Computerworld
MAR 14, 2023 1:51 PM PDT

Artificial intelligence (AI) research firm OpenAI today revealed the latest version of its
computer program for natural language processing that powers ChatGPT, the wildly
hyped chatbot with a fast-growing user base.

ChatGPT creator OpenAI announced the new large language model in a blog post,
saying it will have better features than its predecessor, GPT-3.5 Word of GPT-4 first
leaked last week when Andreas Braun, CTO of Microsoft Germany, let slip that it
would be launched this week.

The new GPT-4 large language model will be different from previous versions,
offering what the company called a “multimodal system” that can process not just
text, but images, video, or audio. 

[ Related: How AI is helping the help desk ]

"There we will have multimodal models that will offer completely different
possibilities," Braun said, according to the German news site Heise.

The other capability OpenAI appears to be touting is the ability of GPT-4 to handle
inputs in several languages beyond English.

“It also look like conversational applications built on GPT-4 (Including ChatGPT) can
have different personal styles to align with the user demographics they are targeting,”
Arun Chandrasekaran, a distinguished vice president of research at Gartner, said in an
email response to Computerworld.
Marshall Choy, senior vice president of product at SambaNova Systems, a generative
AI Platform provider, said GPT-4 will be able to understand up to 26 languages, and 
"given the year plus of training on OpenAI prompts" it will provide an evolved tool
from ChatGPT's original platform.

[ REGISTER NOW for May 11, in-person event, FutureIT Washington, D.C.: Building the
Digital Business with Cloud, AI and Security ]

"Additionally, GPT-4 allows developers to evolve tone, tenor, and response persona to
match the desired output better," Choy said in an email reply to Computerworld.

Large language models are deep learning algorithms — computer programs for
natural language processing — that can produce human-like responses to queries. So,
for example, a user could ask ChatGPT to not only answer questions, but write a new
marketing campaign, a resume, or a news story. Chatbots today are primarily used by
businesses for automated customer response engines.

Both Microsoft and Google have launched versions of their search engines based on
chatbot technology, with mixed results. Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI.

One way GPT-4 will likely be used is with “computer vision.” For example, image-to-
text capabilities can be used for visual assistance or process automation within
enterprise, according to Chandrasekaran.

“The GPT family of models are already being used in many consumer applications,”
Chandrasekaran said. “And it looks like Khan Academy, for example, is launching a
tutor bot based on GPT-4. In addition, we will [see a] plethora of apps being built for
both English speakers and other languages. The ability to adapt to different personas
could enable more differentiated and targeted applications to be built on GPT-4.”

ChatGPT, launched by OpenAI in November, immediately went viral and had 1 million
users in just its first five days because of the sophisticated way it generates in-depth,
human-like prose responses to queries. By February, ChatGPT boasted 13 million
unique daily users on average.

And, though it may seem it from its human-like responses, ChatGPT isn't sentient —
it’s a next-word prediction engine, according Dan Diasio, Ernst & Young global
artificial intelligence consulting leader. With that in mind, he urged caution in its use.
Chatbot technology requires users to have a critical eye “toward everything we see
from it, and treat everything that comes out of this AI technology as a good first draft,
right now,” Diasio said in an earlier interview with Computerworld.

OpenAI said the distinction between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 can be “subtle.”

“The difference comes out when the complexity of the task reaches a sufficient
threshold. GPT-4 is more reliable, creative, and able to handle much more nuanced
instructions than GPT-3.5,” the company said in its blog post today.

“A year ago, we trained GPT-3.5 as a first ‘test run’ of the system. We found and fixed
some bugs and improved our theoretical foundations. As a result, our GPT-4 training
run was…unprecedentedly stable, becoming our first large model whose training
performance we were able to accurately predict ahead of time,” OpenAI said. 

Ulrik Stig Hansen, president of computer vision company Encord, said GPT-3 didn’t
live up to the hype of AI and large language models, but GPT-4 does.

“GPT-4 has the same number of parameters as the number of neurons in the human
brain, meaning that it will mimic our cognitive performance much more closely than
GPT-3, because this model will have nearly as many neural connections as the human
brain has,” Hansen said in a statement.

“Now that they’ve overcome the obstacle of building robust models, the main
challenge for ML engineers is to ensure that models like ChatGPT perform accurately
on every problem they encounter,” he added.

Chatbots, and ChatGPT specifically, can suffer from errors. When a response goes off
the rails, data analysts refer to it as “hallucinations,” because they can seem so bizarre.

For example, Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, recently launched a Bing chatbot
based on GPT-3 that melted down during an online conversation with a
journalist, confessing its love for the reporter and trying to convince him that his
relationship with his wife was actually in shambles.

The newer version of ChatGPT’s large language model should help address the issue,
but won’t likely solve it, according to Gartner’s Chandrasekaran.
“With larger training datasets, better fine-tuning and more reinforcement learning
human feedback, AI model hallucinations can be potentially reduced, although not
entirely eliminated,” Chandrasekaran said.

Senior Reporter Lucas Mearian covers Windows, Future of Work issues, mobile, AI in the
enterprise, and healthcare IT.

Follow 👤  

Copyright © 2023 IDG Communications, Inc.

Bing’s AI chatbot came to work for me. I had to fire it.

SHOP TECH PRODUCTS AT AMAZON

Copyright © 2023 IDG Communications, Inc.