OpenAI, the leading research institute in the field of artificial intelligence, has announced the release of GPT-4, the latest and most advanced version of its large language model. According to the company, GPT-4 represents a significant milestone in scaling up deep learning, but it is still less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios. The model’s improved multimodal capabilities allow it to accept text and image inputs from users, in addition to generating text responses.
GPT-4’s release comes as Microsoft integrates the model into its search engine Bing Chat and opens up a waiting list for developers. Microsoft has invested more than $11 billion into OpenAI as part of a strategic partnership to integrate AI into its products and services. However, on the same day as the release of GPT-4, technology newsletter Platformer reported that Microsoft had laid off its entire ethics and society team as part of a larger round of redundancies affecting 10,000 employees across the company.
The move by Microsoft has raised concerns that the company no longer has a dedicated staff to ensure AI principles such as user safety and lack of bias are integrated into its product developments. Despite this, Microsoft claims its overall investment in responsibility work is increasing despite the recent layoffs.
Since its launch in November, ChatGPT’s popularity has surged, with traffic to the site hitting over one billion visits, up from 616 million in January, according to Similarweb estimates. The model’s predecessor, GPT-3.5, only accepted text input, while GPT-4’s multimodal capabilities represent a significant improvement. OpenAI claims that the model exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks. For example, GPT-4 scores in the 90th percentile on a practice bar exam, the qualifying test for lawyers, while GPT-3.5’s score was in the bottom 10 percent.
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