In an unexpected announcement today, OpenAI released the long-awaited GPT-4 model, an update of the technology behind its popular chatbot, ChatGPT. The company is calling GPT-4 its “most advanced system, producing safer and more useful responses.” The surprise announcement comes less than four months after ChatGPT debuted and became the fastest-growing consumer application in history.
GPT-4 advances the core technology of ChatGPT by enabling the chat software to solve more difficult problems with greater accuracy, thanks to its broader general knowledge and problem solving abilities. It also adds new capabilities such as accepting images as inputs and generating captions, classifications, and analyses. GPT-4 is also capable of handling over 25,000 words of text, allowing for use cases like long-form content creation, extended conversations, and document search and analysis.
The announcement came as a surprise to many in the tech community, which widely believed GPT-4 would be announced at Microsoft’s Future of Work with AI event on Thursday. The news dropped on the same day that Google announced a laundry list of new generative AI capabilities, including a PaLM API and new features in Google Cloud and Google Workspace.
