OpenAI Makes GPT-4 Generally Available

OpenAI has announced the general availability of GPT-4, its latest text-generating model, through its API. Starting this afternoon, all existing OpenAI API developers with a history of successful payments can access GPT-4. The company plans to open up access to new developers by the end of this month and then start raising availability limits after that depending on compute availability.

Growing Demand and Innovation

Millions of developers have requested access to the GPT-4 API since March, and the range of innovative products leveraging GPT-4 is growing every day, OpenAI wrote in a blog post. The company envisions a future where chat-based models can support any use case.

Improved Capabilities

GPT-4 can generate text (including code) and accept image and text inputs, an improvement over GPT-3.5, its predecessor, which only accepted text. It performs at a human level on various professional and academic benchmarks.

Training and Limitations

Like previous GPT models from OpenAI, GPT-4 was trained using publicly available data, including from public web pages, as well as data that OpenAI licensed. However, GPT-4's image-understanding capability is currently only available to a single partner, Be My Eyes. OpenAI has not indicated when it will open it up to the wider customer base. It is important to note that, like other generative AI models, GPT-4 is not perfect. It may hallucinate facts and make reasoning errors, sometimes with confidence. Additionally, it does not learn from its experience and may fail at hard problems, such as introducing security vulnerabilities into generated code.

Future Fine-Tuning Capability

In the future, OpenAI plans to allow developers to fine-tune GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 Turbo, another recent text-generating model, with their own data. This capability is expected to arrive later this year. OpenAI aims to optimize its compute capacity by deprecating old models available through its API, starting January 4, 2024. Certain older models, including GPT-3 and its derivatives, will be replaced with new base GPT-3 models. Developers using the old models will need to manually upgrade their integrations, and those who wish to continue using fine-tuned old models will need to fine-tune replacements atop the new base GPT-3 models. OpenAI will provide support to users for a smooth transition.

OpenAI has also made its DALL-E 2 and Whisper APIs generally available. DALL-E 2 is OpenAI's image-generating model, while Whisper refers to the company's speech-to-text model.

Overall, OpenAI's release of GPT-4 and its plans for future improvements demonstrate the growing competition in the field of generative AI models and the company's commitment to advancing the capabilities of its text-generating technology.

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