ChatGPT helped kick off the current wave of generative AI technology, and the underlying GPT software powers many other AI-based apps and services. OpenAI has announced a few improvements coming to ChatGPT and the GPT APIs, potentially making AI a lot more useful.
OpenAI revealed its new GPT-4 Turbo model today at its “DevDay” event, which is an improved version of the GPT-4 model that was released earlier this year. The company said, “GPT-4 Turbo is more capable and has knowledge of world events up to April 2023. It has a 128k context window so it can fit the equivalent of more than 300 pages of text in a single prompt.”
The regular version of GPT-4 is available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers, and Bing Chat uses GPT-4 for conversations. ChatGPT and the GPT language model were initially trained on data up to September 2021, so questions about more recent events or facts didn’t work. The GPT-3.5 language model is still stuck on data up to January 2022, while GPT-4 has been updated a few times to more recent data (it’s now on October 2023). The web browsing plugin in ChatGPT was a partial workaround, allowing ChatGPT to search the web for more recent information, but integrating newer data into the model should be more reliable. Bing Chat also uses web searches to answer most questions.
OpenAI says GPT-4 Turbo is more reliable with tasks that require careful following of instructions, such as answers in specific formats. It also supports JSON mode, which ensures that the output will be valid JSON—that’s mostly only helpful for services using the API or programmers.
The existing GPT-3.5 Turbo model, which is still the only one available to free ChatGPT users, is also being updated. The blog post explains, “The new 3.5 Turbo supports improved instruction following, JSON mode, and parallel function calling. For instance, our internal evals show a 38% improvement on format following tasks such as generating JSON, XML and YAML.”
GPT-4 Turbo is available to developers starting today, and it should be available for ChatGPT Plus subscribers soon. It’s not clear when GPT-4 or GPT-4 Turbo will roll out to free ChatGPT users, but GPT-4 Turbo is (supposedly) cheaper to operate than the initial GPT-4 release, which was one of the reasons OpenAI limited it to paying customers.
Source: OpenAI
