AI powerhouse OpenAI announced latest milestone GPT-4, the next big update to the technology that powers ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing, the search engine using the tech, on March 14, 2023.
OpenAI says that GPT-4 also “exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks.”, so much that it even clears several top examinations with flying colours, like it passes a simulated bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers; in contrast, GPT-3.5’s score was around the bottom 10%. It’s supposedly bigger, faster, and more accurate.
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GPT-4 AND GPT-3.5?
However, the distinction between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 can be subtle. The difference comes out when the complexity of the task reaches a sufficient threshold—GPT-4 is more reliable, creative, and able to handle much more fine distinctions in instructions than GPT-3.5. As the two models were tested on variety of benchmarks, it was observed that GPT-4 outperforms GPT-3.5.
GPT-3.5 takes only text prompts, whereas the latest version, GPT-4 is a large multimodal model that can also use images as inputs to recognize objects in a picture, analyses them and generates text outputs given inputs consisting of interspersed text and images.
GPT-3.5 is limited to about 3,000-word responses, while GPT-4, being more multilingual, can generate responses of more than 25,000 words.
The biggest drawbacks of generative models like ChatGPT and Bing is their propensity to occasionally go off the rails, getting facts mixed up and produce misinformation. But GPT-4 is harder to trick and is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content than its predecessor and scores 40% higher on certain tests of factuality.
OpenAI says that it spent 6 months training GPT-4 using lessons from its “adversarial testing program” as well as ChatGPT, resulting in the company’s “best-ever results on factuality, steerability, and refusing to go outside of guardrails.”
Another limitation of Large Language Models (LLMs) may have is how much information they can process in a conversation. Where ChatGPT could process 8,000 words at a time before it started to lose track of things, GPT-4 can maintain its integrity over way lengthier conversations by pumping those numbers up to 32,768 tokens or around 64,000 words. It can also process lengthy documents and generate long-form content – something that was a lot more limited on GPT-3.5.
Interestingly, it will also let developers decide their AI’s style of tone and verbosity.
WHAT ARE THE LIMITATIONS OF GPT-4?
OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said GPT-4 was “most capable and aligned” with human values and intent, though “it is still flawed.”
GPT-4 has similar limitations as its prior versions and is “less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios”. Inaccurate responses known as “hallucinations” have been a challenge for many AI programs, including GPT-4. It generally lacks knowledge of events that occurred after September 2021, when the vast majority of its data was cut off. It also does not learn from experience.
Can you try GPT-4 right now?
While GPT-4 can process both text and image inputs, only the text-input feature will be available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers and software developers, with a waitlist, while the image-input ability is not publicly available yet. The subscription plan, which offers faster response time and priority access to new features and improvements, was launched in February and costs $20 per month.
However, if you don’t wish to pay, then there’s an ‘unofficial’ way to begin using GPT-4 immediately. GPT-4 powers Microsoft’s Bing AI chatbot and some features on language learning platform Duolingo’s subscription tier.