The AI behind popular chatbot ChatGPT has been updated to a new version known as GPT-4 – and many people have already been unknowingly exposed to the newest AI's supposedly improved capabilities for weeks prior to the announcement. OpenAI, the company that developed GPT-4, says it "spent 6 months making GPT-4 safer and more aligned" so that the AI is less likely to produce "disallowed content" in response to human users' queries. GPT-4 delivers "human-level performance" and outperforms its predecessor GPT-3.5 on many simulated …

OpenAI also announced new partnerships with language learning app Duolingo and Be My Eyes, an application for the visually impaired, to create AI Chatbots which can assist their users using natural language.

Open AI, the creator of the wildly popular ChatGPT, has launched a new and even more powerful AI bot, GPT-4 -- and admits it's so advanced it could be'harmful'. The bot can now accept inputs in the form of images as well as text, but still outputs its answers in text, meaning it can offer detailed descriptions of images. If asked, 'What's funny about this image?' it will reply. Among other things, it can instantly calculate people's tax liability and can pass the Uniform Bar Exam. OpenAI said in a blog post: 'We've created GPT-4, the latest milestone in OpenAI's effort in scaling up deep learning.

Alongside GPT-4, OpenAI has open-sourced a software framework to evaluate the performance of its AI models. Called Evals, OpenAI says that the tooling will allow anyone to report shortcomings in its models to help guide improvements. It's a sort of crowdsourcing approach to model testing, OpenAI explains in a blog post. "We use Evals to guide development of our models (both identifying shortcomings and preventing regressions), and our users can apply it for tracking performance across model versions and evolving product integrations," OpenAI writes. "We are hoping Evals becomes a vehicle to share and crowdsource benchmarks, representing a maximally wide set of failure modes and difficult tasks." OpenAI created Evals to develop and run benchmarks for evaluating models like GPT-4 while inspecting their performance.

The San Francisco-based artificial intelligence lab started in 2015 as a nonprofit, trying to build "artificial general intelligence," or AGI, which is essentially software that's as smart as humans. It was founded with a combined $1 billion pledge from chief executive Sam Altman, Elon Musk, billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel and others.

Despite their ability to crank out incredibly lifelike prose, generative AIs like Google's Bard or OpenAI's ChatGPT (powered by GPT-4), have already shown the current limitations of gen-AI technology as well as their own tenuous grasp of the facts -- arguing that the JWST was the first telescope to image an exoplanet, and that Elvis' dad was an actor. But with this much market share at stake, what are a few misquoted facts against getting their product into the hands of consumers as quickly as possible? The team over at Anthropic, conversely, is made up largely of ex-OpenAI folks and they've taken a more pragmatic approach to the development of their own chatbot, Claude. The result is an AI that is "more steerable" and "much less likely to produce harmful outputs," than ChatGPT, per a report from TechCrunch. Claude has been in closed beta development since late 2022, but has recently begun testing the AI's conversational capabilities with launch partners including Robin AI, Quora and privacy-centered search engine, Duck Duck Go.

The question will be simple but perpetual: Person or machine? Every encounter with language, other than in the flesh, will now bring with it that small, consuming test. For some--teachers, professors, journalists--the question of humanity will be urgent and essential. For those who operate in the large bureaucratic apparatus of boilerplate--copywriters, lawyers, advertisers, political strategists--the question will be irrelevant except as a matter of efficiency. How will they use new artificial-intelligence technology to accelerate the production of language that was already mostly automatic? For everyone, the question will now hover, quotidian and cosmic, over words wherever you find them: Who's there?

The artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI has released GPT-4, the latest version of the groundbreaking AI system that powers ChatGPT, which it says is more creative, less likely to make up facts and less biased than its predecessor. Calling it "our most capable and aligned model yet", OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman said the new system is a "multimodal" model, which means it can take images as well as text as inputs, letting users ask questions about pictures. The new version can handle massive text inputs and can remember and act on more than 20,000 words at once, letting it take an entire novella as a prompt. The new model is available today for users of ChatGPT Plus, the paid-for version of the ChatGPT chatbot, which provided some of the training data for the latest release. OpenAI has also worked with commercial partners to offer GPT-4-powered services. A new subscription tier of language learning app Duolingo, Duolingo Max, will now offer English-speaking users AI-powered conversations in French or Spanish, and can use GPT-4 to explain the mistakes language learners have made.

When Microsoft and OpenAI announced their renewed partnership in January, the two companies also revealed that Bing search would soon boast AI-enhanced lookup capabilities. Little did we know at the time, that Bing search has been powered for the past five weeks, not by the existing then-state-of-the-art GPT-3.5 model but by its even more robust successor, GPT-4. Microsoft envisions Bing -- and really Google is doing much the same with Bard -- serving as a pseudo-gatekeeper to the rest of internet's information, not unlike what AOL's early America Online service once did. Rather than direct users to other websites where they can find the information and context they seek on their own, these companies are looking to have generative AI systems (Bard and Bing) automatically summarize and display that information without ever leaving the branded search page. Any additional relevant context that the user might have stumbled across during their independent research will similarly be deigned by the algorithm.

Less than four months after releasing ChatGPT, the text-generating AI that seems to have pushed us into a science-fictional age of technology, OpenAI has unveiled a new product called GPT-4. Rumors and hype about this program have circulated for more than a year: Pundits have said that it would be unfathomably powerful, writing 60,000-word books from single prompts and producing videos out of whole cloth. Today's announcement suggests that GPT-4's abilities, while impressive, are more modest: It performs better than the previous model on standardized tests and other benchmarks, works across dozens of languages, and can take images as input--meaning that it's able, for instance, to describe the contents of a photo or a chart. Unlike ChatGPT, this new model is not currently available for public testing (although you can apply or pay for access), so the obtainable information comes from OpenAI's blog post, and from a New York Times story based on a demonstration. From what we know, relative to other programs, GPT-4 appears to have added 150 points to its SAT score, now a 1410 out of 1600, and jumped from the bottom to the top 10 percent of performers on a simulated bar exam.