LONDON (AP) – The company behind the ChatGPT chatbot has rolled out its latest artificial intelligence (AI) model, GPT-4, in the next step for a technology that’s caught the world’s attention.
The new system can figure out tax deductions and answer questions like a Shakespearan pirate, for example, but it still “hallucinates” facts and makes reasoning errors.
Here’s a look at San Francisco-based startup OpenAI’s latest improvement on the generative AI models that can spit out readable text and unique images:
WHAT’S NEW?
OpenAI says GPT-4 “exhibits human-level performance”. It’s much more reliable, creative and can handle “more nuanced instructions” than its predecessor system, GPT-3.5, which ChatGPT was built on, OpenAI said in its announcement.
In an online demo, OpenAI President Greg Brockman ran through some scenarios that showed off GPT-4’s capabilities that appeared to show it’s a radical improvement on previous versions.
He demonstrated how the system could quickly come up with the proper income tax deduction after being fed reams of tax code – something he couldn’t figure himself.
“It’s not perfect, but neither are you. And together it’s this amplifying tool that lets you just reach new heights,” Brockman said.
WHAT ARE THE IMPROVEMENTS?
GPT-4 is a “large multimodal model”, which means it can be fed both text and images that it uses to come up with answers. In one example posted on OpenAI’s website, GPT-4 is asked, “What is unusual about this image?”
It’s answer: “The unusual thing about this image is that a man is ironing clothes on an ironing board attached to the roof of a moving taxi.”
GPT-4 is also “steerable”, which means that instead of getting an answer in ChatGPT’s “classic” fixed tone and verbosity, users can customise it by asking for responses in the style of a Shakespearean pirate, for instance.
In his demo, Brockman asked both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 to summarise in one sentence an article explaining the difference between the two systems.
The catch was that every word had to start with the letter G. GPT-3.5 didn’t even try, spitting out a normal sentence.
The newer version swiftly responded: “GPT-4 generates groundbreaking, grandiose gains, greatly galvanising generalised AI goals.”
HOW WELL DOES IT WORK?
ChatGPT can write silly poems and songs or quickly explain just about anything found on the Internet.
It also gained notoriety for results that could be way off, such as confidently providing a detailed but false account of the Super Bowl game days before it took place, or even being disparaging to users.
OpenAI acknowledged that GPT-4 still has limitations and warned users to be careful. GPT-4 is “still not fully reliable” because it “hallucinates” facts and makes reasoning errors, it said.
Experts also advised caution. “We should remember that language models such as GPT-4 do not think in a human-like way, and we should not be misled by their fluency with language,” said professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Bath Nello Cristianini.
