(CNN) On the first day after the unveiling, GPT-4 amazed many users in early testing and a business demo with its ability to draft lawsuits, pass standardized exams, and build a working website from a hand-drawn sketch.
On Tuesday, OpenAI announced the next generation version of the artificial intelligence technology that underpins its viral chatbot tool, ChatGPT. The more powerful GPT-4 promises to blow previous iterations out of the water, potentially changing the way we use the internet to work, play and create. But it can also contribute to challenging questions about how AI tools could revolutionize professions, enable students to cheat and change our relationship with technology.
GPT-4 is an updated version of the company’s large language model, trained on massive amounts of online data to solve complex responses to user questions. It’s now available via a waitlist and has already made its way to a number of third-party products, including Microsoft’s new AI-powered Bing search engine. Some users with early access to the tool share their experiences and highlight some of its most compelling use cases.
Here’s a closer look at GPT-4’s potential:
Analyze more than text
Essentially, the biggest change in GPT-4 is the ability to work with photos that users upload.
One of the most mind-blowing use cases to date came from an OpenAI video demo showing how a drawing can be turned into a functional website within a few minutes. The demonstrator uploaded the image in GPT-4 and then pasted the resulting code into an example that showed how it could be a working website.
In its announcement, OpenAI also showed how GPT-4 was asked to explain a joke from a series of images – which showed a smartphone with the wrong charger – and described why it was funny. While it may sound simple, parsing a joke is more complicated for artificial intelligence tools to pick up due to the context needed.
In another test, The New York Times showed GPT-4 a photo of the inside of a refrigerator and asked it to come up with a meal based on its ingredients.
The photo feature isn’t live yet, but OpenAI is expected to roll it out in the coming weeks.
Coding made even easier
Some early GPT-4 users with very little to no prior coding knowledge have also used it recreate iconic games like Pong, Tetris, or Snake after following the tool’s step-by-step instructions on how to do so. Others have made their own original games. (GPT-4 can write code in all major programming languages, according to OpenAI.)
“GPT-4’s powerful language capabilities will be used for everything from storyboarding, character creation, to game content creation,” said Arun Chandrasekaran, an analyst at Gartner Research. “This could lead to more independent game providers in the future. But beyond the game itself, GPT-4 and similar models can be used to create marketing content around game previews, generate news articles, and even moderate gaming content. discussion boards.”
GPT-4, like gaming, can change the way people develop apps. A user on Twitter said she made a simple drawing app in minutes, while another claimed to have encrypted an app that recommends five new movies every day, along with providing trailers and details on where to watch them.
“Programming is like learning to drive a car — as long as the beginner gets some guidance, anyone can code,” says Lian Jye Su, an analyst at ABI Research. “AI can be a good teacher.”
Passed tests with flying colors
While OpenAI said the update is “less capable” than humans in many real-world scenarios, it shows “human-level performance” in several professional and academic tests. The company said GPT-4 recently passed a simulated law school exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers. In contrast, the previous version, GPT-3.5, scored around the bottom 10%. The latest version also performed strongly on the LSAT, GRE, SATs, and many AP exams, according to OpenAI.
In January, ChatGPT made headlines for passing prestigious graduate-level exams, such as one from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, but not with particularly high marks. The company said it had been using lessons from its testing program and ChatGPT for months to improve the system’s accuracy and ability to stay on topic.
Give more accurate answers
Compared to the previous version, GPT-4 can produce longer, more detailed and more reliable written responses, according to the company.
The latest version can now provide answers of up to 25,000 words, up from about 4,000 before, and can provide detailed instructions for even the most unique scenarios, ranging from cleaning a piranha’s aquarium to extracting the DNA from a strawberry. An early user said it provided in-depth suggestions for pick up lines based on a question on a dating profile.
Streamlining work across industries
Joshua Browder, CEO of legal services chatbot DoNotPay, said his company already is engaged in using the tool to generate “one-click lawsuits” to sue robocallers, in an early indication of GPT-4’s enormous potential to change the way people work across industries.
“Imagine getting a call, clicking a button, [the] call is transcribed and a 1,000 word court case is generated. GPT-3.5 wasn’t good enough, but GPT-4 handles the job extremely well,” Browder tweeted.
Meanwhile, Jake Kozloski, CEO of dating site Keeper, said his company is use the tool to better with users.
According to Su from ABI Research, it’s possible we’ll see big advances in “connected car” as well. [dashboards]remote diagnosis in healthcare and other AI applications that were not possible before.”
A work in progress
While the company has made massive improvements to its AI model, GPT-4 has similar limitations to previous versions. OpenAI said the technology lacks knowledge of events that happened before the dataset stopped (September 2021) and does not learn from its experience. It may also make “simple reasoning errors” or be “overly credulous in accepting obvious false statements from a user,” and fail to double-check the work, the company said.
Gartner’s Chandrasekaran said this is also a reflection of many AI models today. “Let’s not forget that these AI models are not perfect,” Chandrasekaran said. “They can produce inaccurate information from time to time and can have a black-box character.”
For now, OpenAI said GPT-4 users should exercise caution and be “very careful,” especially “in high-stakes contexts.”
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