Breaking News: OpenAI Launches GPT-4, the Cutting-Edge Text-Generating Model, via API Access
Existing OpenAI API developers with a successful payment history can access GPT-4 starting today. OpenAI plans to expand access to new developers by the end of this month and gradually increase availability limits based on compute availability.
The demand for GPT-4 has been substantial, with millions of developers requesting API access since March. OpenAI envisions a future where chat-based models can support any use case, leading to a growing range of innovative products utilizing GPT-4.
Compared to its predecessor GPT-3.5, GPT-4 offers improved capabilities. It can generate text, including code, and accepts image and text inputs. GPT-4 performs at a “human level” on various professional and academic benchmarks. It was trained using publicly available data and licensed data from OpenAI.
While GPT-4’s image-understanding capability is currently limited to partner testing with Be My Eyes, OpenAI has not specified when it will expand access to other customers.
It is important to note that GPT-4, like other generative AI models, is not flawless. It may produce incorrect facts and reasoning errors, sometimes with confidence. Additionally, it lacks the ability to learn from experience and may struggle with complex problems such as introducing security vulnerabilities into generated code.
OpenAI plans to enable developers to fine-tune GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 Turbo with their own data later this year. This aligns with the existing capability offered by several of OpenAI’s other text-generating models.
The competition in generative AI has intensified since the reveal of GPT-4 in March. Anthropic recently extended the context window for Claude, its text-generating AI model, to 100,000 tokens. In comparison, GPT-4 had a context window of 32,000 tokens, allowing it to consider more context and stay on topic.
In a related announcement, OpenAI has made it’s DALL-E 2 and Whisper APIs generally available. DALL-E 2 focuses on image generation, while Whisper is OpenAI’s speech-to-text model. The company also plans to deprecate older models in its API to optimize compute capacity and address the increasing demand for generative models.
Starting January 4, 2024, certain older models, including GPT-3 and its derivatives, will be replaced with new “base GPT-3” models that offer improved computing efficiency.
Developers using the old models will need to manually upgrade their integrations, and those wishing to continue using fine-tuned old models will have to fine-tune replacements on the new base GPT-3 models.
OpenAI will provide support to users during this transition period and will reach out to developers who have recently utilized the older models to offer further guidance. More information will be shared as the new completion models become available for early testing in the coming weeks.
