Tech research company OpenAI has just released an updated version of its text-generating artificial intelligence program, called GPT-4, and demonstrated some of the language model’s new abilities. Not only can GPT-4 produce more natural-sounding text and solve problems more accurately than its predecessor. It can also process images in addition to text. But the AI is still vulnerable to some of the same problems that plagued earlier GPT models: displaying bias, overstepping the guardrails intended to prevent it from saying offensive or dangerous things and “hallucinating,” or confidently making up falsehoods not found in its training data.
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OpenAI says it has run both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 through a variety of tests designed for humans, including a simulation of a lawyer’s bar exam, the SAT and Advanced Placement tests for high schoolers, the GRE for college graduates and even a couple of sommelier exams. GPT-4 achieved human-level scores on many of these benchmarks and consistently outperformed its predecessor, although it did not ace everything: it performed poorly on English language and literature exams, for example. Still, its extensive problem-solving ability could be applied to any number of real-world applications—such as managing a complex schedule, finding errors in a block of code, explaining grammatical nuances to foreign-language learners or identifying security vulnerabilities.
