Four months after the release of groundbreaking ChatGPT, the company behind it has announced its “safer and more aligned” successor, GPT-4.
Describing it as a model with the “best-ever results on capabilities and alignment,” ChatGPT’s creator OpenAI has spent six months developing this improved version promising more creativity and less likelihood of misinformation and biases.
However, the company warns that it is still prone to “hallucinations” – which refers to the chatbot’s tendencies to make up facts or give wrong responses.
Given the fact that artificial intelligence (AI) bots learn based on analysing lots of online data, ChatGPT’s failures in some areas and its users’ experiences have helped make GPT-4 a better and safer tool to use.
According to OpenAI, “GPT-4 is more reliable, creative, and able to handle much more nuanced instructions than GPT-3.5”.
GPT-4: What’s changed and what improved?
OpenAI claims GPT-4 is more creative in terms of generating creative writings – such as screenplays and poems, and composing songs – with an improved capability to mimic users’ writing styles for more personalised results.
GPT-4 is further described as a “multimodal” model, meaning that it can accept different inputs in form of text and images.
As a result, it will be capable of generating captions and providing responses by analysing the components of images.
Perhaps more impressively, thanks to its new advanced reasoning abilities, OpenAI’s new system can now ace various standardised tests.
Previous versions of the technology, for instance, weren’t able to pass legal exams for the Bar and did not perform as well on most Advanced Placement tests, especially in maths.
According to OpenAI, GPT-4 has the potential to score in the top 10 per cent of students in the US taking the Uniform Bar Examination.
The company’s tests also suggest that the system could score 1,300 out of 1,600 on the SAT and a perfect score of five on Advanced Placement exams in subjects such as calculus, psychology, statistics, and history.
What are some of GPT-4 limitations?
Although features of the improved version of the chatbot sound impressive, GPT-4 is still hampered by “hallucinations” and prone to making up facts.
While according to OpenAI, GPT-4 scores “40 per cent higher” on tests that measure these hallucinations, the company admits “GPT-4 still has many known limitations that we are working to address, such as social biases, hallucinations, and adversarial prompts”.
Other limitations until now include the inaccessibility of the image input feature. While it may be exciting to know that GPT-4 will be able to suggest meals based on a picture of ingredients, this technology isn’t available for public use just yet.
Moreover, GPT-4 is set to initially be released exclusively to subscribers of ChatGPT Plus, a premium service that requires a monthly fee of $20 (€18.90).