The artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI on Tuesday launched the newest version of its language software, GPT-4, an advanced tool for analyzing images and mimicking human speech, pushing the technical and ethical boundaries of a rapidly proliferating wave of AI. OpenAI's earlier product, ChatGPT, captivated and unsettled the public with its uncanny ability to generate elegant writing, unleashing a viral wave of college essays, screenplays and conversations -- though it relied on an older generation of technology that hasn't been cutting-edge for more than a year. GPT-4, in contrast, is a state-of-the-art system capable of creating not just words but describing images in response to a person's simple written commands. When shown a photo of a boxing glove hanging over a wooden seesaw with a ball on one side, for instance, a person can ask what will happen if the glove drops, and GPT-4 will respond that it would hit the seesaw and cause the ball to fly up. The buzzy launch capped months of hype and anticipation over an AI program, known as a large language model, that early testers had claimed was remarkably advanced in its ability to reason and learn new things.

The developers of GPT-4 claimed that the program can exhibit "human-level performance" on certain exams. While the chart of various academic test scores seems impressive at first, the software failed both AP English exams with a 2 out of 5. It scored extremely well on tests where all that a computer program needed was the right information, which isn't very impressive to anyone who has used Google in the past few decades. Again, I don't think that we're suddenly going to be bleeding lawyers. As someone who has actually performed reasonably well on the LSAT, I can also tell you that taking the test and practicing law are very different things.

GPT-4 didn't give me an existential crisis. But it exacerbated the dizzy and vertiginous feeling I've been getting whenever I think about A.I. lately. And it has made me wonder whether that feeling will ever fade, or whether we're going to be experiencing "future shock" -- the term coined by the writer Alvin Toffler for the feeling that too much is changing, too quickly -- for the rest of our lives. For a few hours on Tuesday, I prodded GPT-4 -- which is included with ChatGPT Plus, the $20-a-month version of OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT -- with different types of questions, hoping to uncover some of its strengths and weaknesses. I asked GPT-4 to help me with a complicated tax problem.

In 2016 a computer named AlphaGo made headlines for defeating then world champion Lee Sedol at the ancient, popular strategy game Go. The "superhuman" artificial intelligence, developed by Google DeepMind, lost only one of the five rounds to Sedol, generating comparisons to Garry Kasparov's 1997 chess loss to IBM's Deep Blue. Go, which involves players facing off by moving black and white pieces called stones with the goal of occupying territory on the game board, had been viewed as a more intractable challenge to a machine opponent than chess. Much agonizing about the threat of AI to human ingenuity and livelihood followed AlphaGo's victory, not unlike what's happening right now with ChatGPT and its kin. In a 2016 news conference after the loss, though, a subdued Sedol offered a comment with a kernel of positivity.

The UK government is to invest £900m in a cutting-edge supercomputer as part of an artificial intelligence strategy that includes ensuring the country can build its own "BritGPT". The treasury outlined plans to spend around £900m on building an exascale computer, which would be several times more powerful than the UK's biggest computers, and establishing a new AI research body. An exascale computer can be used for training complex AI models, but also have other uses across science, industry and defence, including modelling weather forecasts and climate projections. The Treasury said the £900m investment will "allow researchers to better understand climate change, power the discovery of new drugs and maximise our potential in AI.". An exascale computer is one that can carry out more than one billion billion simple calculations a second, a metric known as an "exaflops".

The company behind the ChatGPT app that churns out essays, poems or computing code on command released Tuesday a long-awaited update of its artificial intelligence (AI) technology that it said would be safer and more accurate than its predecessor. GPT-4 has been widely awaited ever since ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late November, wowing users with its capabilities that were based on an older version of OpenAI's technology, known as a large language model. "We've created GPT-4, the latest milestone in OpenAI's effort in scaling up deep learning," a company blog said, adding that the AI technology "exhibits human-level performance" on some professional and academic tasks. The company said the model is "more creative and collaborative than ever before" and would "solve difficult problems with greater accuracy" than its earlier versions. With its update, text responses from GPT-4 will be more accurate, and--in future--will come from both image and text inputs in a major leap forward for the technology, though this aspect has not yet been released.

Don't misinterpret this section header--ChatGPT and Google are different. The latter is primarily a tech-based search engine. The former is a conversational AI model (or chatbot) that responds like a human to the questions we input. That means we don't have to click through different links to find what we need. Here's how: Google pulls information from all over the internet, but users can condition ChatGPT to retrieve data it's trained on, and it gets smarter over time. That means we can train the AI model to keenly personalize our search requests.

But why would people opt to have a metaverse wedding? And will these sorts of ceremonies--especially sponsored ones--stick around, or will they fade away if virtual reality doesn't live up to the hype? China's annual, week-long parliamentary meeting ended on Monday. Among all the changes it announced, there's one that the tech world is avidly watching: the creation of a new regulatory body named the National Data Administration. The NDA will help build smart cities in China, digitize government services, improve internet infrastructure, and make government agencies share data with each other.

I've written about technology for 25 years and I have never encountered anything as fascinating as ChatGPT. Seeing its responses often gives me a sense of vertigo, like everything is moving too fast. And everything has just got a little bit faster. Last night, OpenAI announced and launched the latest version of the model which underlies ChatGPT, GPT-4. The new version brings several advanced capabilities, including the power to ace legal exams, understand images and digest prompts up to 25,000 words long.

When Microsoft announced the new AI-enabled Bing, which it built on top of OpenAI's GPT models, neither company would confirm which version of GPT was being used beyond saying it was a next-gen version of the model that powered ChatGPT. Today, OpenAI announced GPT-4, a significant update to GPT-3.5. As it turns out, Bing was using it all along. "We are happy to confirm that the new Bing is running on GPT-4, which we've customized for search," Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi, the company's corporate VP and consumer chief marketing officer, wrote in today's announcement. "If you've used the new Bing preview at any time in the last five weeks, you've already experienced an early version of this powerful model."