Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI has announced the release of GPT-4, the latest version of its popular artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT.

“We’ve created GPT-4, the latest milestone in OpenAI’s effort in scaling up deep learning. GPT-4 is a large multimodal model (accepting image and text inputs, emitting text outputs) that, while less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks,” OpenAI announced on its website on Tuesday.

“For example, it passes a simulated bar exam with a score around the top 10 percent of test takers; in contrast, GPT-3.5’s score was around the bottom 10 percent. We’ve spent six months iteratively aligning GPT-4 using lessons from our adversarial testing program as well as ChatGPT, resulting in our best-ever results (though far from perfect) on factuality, steerability, and refusing to go outside of guardrails,” the company said in a post.

“We are releasing GPT-4’s text input capability via ChatGPT and the API (with a waitlist). To prepare the image input capability for wider availability, we’re collaborating closely with a single partner to start. We’re also open-sourcing OpenAI Evals, our framework for automated evaluation of AI model performance, to allow anyone to report shortcomings in our models to help guide further improvements,” it added.

Over the past two years, OpenAI said it has rebuilt its entire deep learning stack and, together with Azure, co-designed a supercomputer from the ground up for our workload.

“A year ago, we trained GPT-3.5 as a first ‘test run’ of the system. We found and fixed some bugs and improved our theoretical foundations. As a result, our GPT-4 training run was (for us at least!) unprecedentedly stable, becoming our first large model whose training performance we were able to accurately predict ahead of time. As we continue to focus on reliable scaling, we aim to hone our methodology to help us predict and prepare for future capabilities increasingly far in advance—something we view as critical for safety,” the company explained.

It is worth noting that GPT-4 can accept a prompt of text and images, which—parallel to the text-only setting—lets the user specify any vision or language task.

“Specifically, it generates text outputs (natural language, code, etc.) given inputs consisting of interspersed text and images. Over a range of domains—including documents with text and photographs, diagrams, or screenshots—GPT-4 exhibits similar capabilities as it does on text-only inputs. Furthermore, it can be augmented with test-time techniques that were developed for text-only language models, including few-shot and chain-of-thought prompting. Image inputs are still a research preview and not publicly available,” OpenAI added.

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