GPT-4 Is Here, it is astounding Impressive, Exciting and Scary

ChatGPT has taken the tech world by storm, showcasing artificial intelligence (AI) with conversational abilities that go far beyond anything we’ve seen before. GPT-4 Is Here, it is astounding Impressive, Exciting and Scary

It’s been barely a few months since we’ve all first heard of and tried out (and, in most cases, fell in love with) the revolutionary ChatGPT, and since GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 models became a no. 1 topic all over the internet. Shortly after, the leaks about OpenAI’s Foundry followed.

And before we even managed to wrap our heads around it all, OpenAI surprised us with another treat, introducing the model’s next generation — the GPT-4.

New AI technology might boost human performance

The newly released GPT-4 artificial intelligence (AI) technology can do many things, but perhaps its most powerful ability is to help users be more creative.

OpenAI recently announced the next-generation version of the artificial intelligence technology that runs its viral chatbot tool, ChatGPT.  It can produce more natural-sounding text and solve problems more accurately than its predecessor and can also process images in addition to text. Experts say the software is intended to aid human abilities rather than replace them.

“GPT-4 ought to be both more useful and more creative than its predecessors in part simply because it is more intelligent or, at least, has a greater capacity for accuracy on cognitive tasks, whether or not one considers this sufficient for true intelligence,” Alex Kiefer, a research and development engineer at Verses.AI, a cognitive computing company, told Simmyideas in an email interview. “More intelligence entails greater sensitivity to distinctions and a greater capacity to draw connections between disparate ideas or domains.”

Eerily Smart

“GPT-4 is a large multimodal model, (accepting image and text inputs, emitting text outputs) that, while less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks,” OpenAI wrote on its website.

An AI engine like ChatGPT has access to a nearly immeasurable amount of information that it processes by sweeping the internet of data. It can combine all those facts in ways that make sense, Jamie Boote, a consultant at Synopsys Software Integrity Group, said via email.

“By extending the capabilities of the engine, ChatGPT is better at synthesizing novel combinations of existing ideas into new combinations that make it more creative,” he added. “By refining the model and training sets to keep ChatGPT from spouting text that humans would interpret as garbage keeps it from crossing the line into nonsense more often.”

Creative humans thrive on new ideas and new combinations. ChatGPT can be an endless source of varieties to build on, Boote said.

“The process from idea to fixed work is often a long and arduous one to the point that the copyright office doesn’t recognize ideas, only fixed works,” he added. “A generative AI can lift the burden between idea and work by filling in the blanks, fleshing out skeletons of outlines, and creating substance from what appears to be nothing.”

Powerful generative AI might boost human creativity by producing novel outputs that human beings on their own couldn’t, or likely wouldn’t have, produced, Kiefer said.

“In this way, humans might use AI to bootstrap new forms of creativity,” Kiefer added. “An example is GPT-4’s ability to summarize text using only words that start with a certain letter, or to quickly compose poems on very specific, including highly technical or scientific, subject matter – while it’s conceivable that a human being could learn to do these things, it’s probably much more likely that GPT will accomplish these, and potentially many other impressive feats, first.”

GPT-4 will be better at generating computer code

One of the most impressive features of ChatGPT (and therefore GPT-3) is its ability to generate not just human languages but computer languages too. This means that it can easily create computer code in a variety of programming languages, including Javascript, Python, and C++ – three of the languages most commonly used in software development, web development, and data analytics.

Earlier this year, news broke that OpenAI was actively hiring programmers and software developers – and specifically, programmers with competence in using human language to describe what their code does. This leads many to predict that future products, including GPT-4, will push AI even further to break new boundaries when it comes to generating computer code. This could lead to more powerful versions of tools such as Microsoft’s Github Copilot, which currently uses a fine-tuned version of GPT-3 to improve its ability to turn natural language into code.

GPT-4 will not add graphics to its capabilities

There had been some speculation that the next evolution of generative AI would involve a combination of the text generation of GPT-3 with the image creation abilities of OpenAI’s other flagship tool, Dall-E 2. This is an exciting idea because it brings the possibility that it would have the ability to turn data into charts, graphics, and other visualizations – functionality missing from GPT-3. However, Altman denied that this is true and said that GPT-4 would remain as a text-only model.

Some people will be disappointed by GPT-4

When something causes as much excitement as GPT-3 has done, there’s an inevitability around the fact that the next iterations may not seem so groundbreaking. After all, once we’ve been amazed at a computer writing poetry, are we going to be as amazed a few years later by a computer writing slightly better poetry? This is a sentiment that’s even been expressed by Altman himself, who said in an interview in January, “The GPT-4 rumor mill is a ridiculous thing. I don’t know where it all comes from … people are begging to be disappointed, and they will be.”

Still Limited

As impressive as GPT-4 is, the software still can’t do many things that humans are capable of. It can also produce false or dangerous answers. Even Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said in a tweet that GPT-4 “is still flawed, still limited, and it seems more impressive on first use than it does after you spend more time with it.”

Boote said he’s not convinced that ChatGPT should be used unsupervised or create outputs that don’t need to be vetted by experts.

“Based on my experience with the engines, ChatGPT 4 still exhibits many of the same overarching flaws that ChatGPT 3.5 does, and this is an incremental step rather than a revolutionary one,” he added. “There will be a point where the internet will be dominated by AI agents like ChatGPT, but that’s still a future state rather than one we’ll have to worry about this week.”