GPT-4 said to blow ChatGPT out of the water; concerns grow
The artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI on Tuesday launched the newest version of its stunning language software, GPT-4, an advanced tool for analyzing images and mimicking human speech, pushing the technical and ethical boundaries of a rapidly proliferating wave of AI.
Its predecessor, ChatGPT, captivated and unsettled the public with its uncanny ability to generate elegant writing, unleashing a viral wave of college essays, screenplays and conversations — though it could only generate text, and it relied on an older generation of technology that hasn’t been cutting edge for more than a year.
GPT-4, in contrast, is a state-of-the-art system capable of creating not just words but describing images in response to a person’s simple written commands. When shown a photo of a boxing glove hanging over a wooden seesaw with a ball on one side, for instance, a person can ask what will happen if the glove drops, and GPT-4 will respond that it would hit the seesaw and cause the ball to fly up.
The buzzy launch capped months of hype and anticipation over an AI program, known as a large language model, that early testers had claimed was remarkably advanced in its ability to reason and learn new things.
The developers pledged in a Tuesday blog post that the technology could further revolutionize work and life. But those promises have also fueled anxiety over how people will be able to compete for jobs outsourced to eerily refined machines or trust the accuracy of what they see online.
Officials with the San Francisco lab said GPT-4’s “multimodal” training across text and images would allow it to escape the chat box and more fully emulate a world of color and imagery, surpassing ChatGPT in its “advanced reasoning capabilities.” A person can submit an image into GPT-4 and it will caption it for them.
Microsoft has invested billions of dollars into OpenAI in hopes its technology will become a secret weapon for its workplace software, search engine and other online ambitions. But AI boosters say those may only skim the surface of what such AI can do, and that it could lead to business models and creative ventures no one can yet predict.
Rapid AI advances, coupled with the wild popularity of ChatGPT, have fueled a multibillion-dollar arms’ race over the future of AI dominance and transformed new-software releases into major spectacles.
OpenAI and Microsoft, which late last year released a GPT-powered chatbot in its Bing search tool, have moved aggressively to counter Google and other AI trailblazers on the belief that these tools could prove crucial to future industries.
But the frenzy has also sparked criticism that the companies are rushing to exploit an untested, unregulated and unpredictable technology that could deceive people, undermine artists’ work and lead to real-world harm.
AI language models often confidently offer wrong answers because they are designed to spit out cogent phrases, not actual facts. And because they have been trained on internet text and imagery, they have also learned to emulate human biases of race, gender, religion and class.
Such systems have inspired boundless optimism around this technology’s potential, with some seeing in its responses a sense of intelligence or sentience almost on par with humans. The systems, though — as critics and the AI researchers are quick to point out — are merely repeating patterns and associations found in their training data without a clear understanding of what it’s saying or when it’s wrong.
Despite its unreliability, Silicon Valley sees massive economic potential in this type of AI because of how easy these models are to use. Anyone can write what’s known as a “prompt” in plain English into a chat box, allowing people who don’t know how to write code the ability to communicate with machines in the same way as computer programmers have for decades.
GPT-4 is expected to improve on some shortcomings, and AI evangelists such as the tech blogger Robert Scoble have argued that “GPT-4 is better than anyone expects.” But critics worry that could lead to its own consequences, such as helping create fake photos of nonexistent events or people doing things they never did.