Amidst growing food production demands, early plant disease detection is essential to safeguard crops; this study proposes a visual machine learning approach for plant disease detection, harnessing RGB and NIR data collected in real-world conditions through a JAI FS-1600D-10GE camera to build an RGBN dataset. A two-stage early plant disease detection model with YOLOv8 and a sequential CNN was used to train on a dataset with partial labels, which showed a 3.6% increase in mAP compared to a single-stage end-to-end segmentation model. The sequential CNN model achieved 90.62% validation accuracy utilising RGBN data. An average of 6.25% validation accuracy increase is found using RGBN in classification compared to RGB using ResNet15 and the sequential CNN models. Further research and dataset improvements are needed to meet food production demands.

We report the development of GPT-4, a large-scale, multimodal model which can accept image and text inputs and produce text outputs. While less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, GPT-4 exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks, including passing a simulated bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers. GPT-4 is a Transformer-based model pre-trained to predict the next token in a document. The post-training alignment process results in improved performance on measures of factuality and adherence to desired behavior. A core component of this project was developing infrastructure and optimization methods that behave predictably across a wide range of scales. This allowed us to accurately predict some aspects of GPT-4's performance based on models trained with no more than 1/1,000th the compute of GPT-4.