OpenAI Unveils GPT-4, Months After ChatGPT Stunned Silicon Valley

GPT-4’s new capabilities may not be obvious to the average person first using the technology. But they are likely to quickly come into focus as laypeople and experts continue to use the service.

Given a lengthy article from The New York Times and asked to summarize it, the bot will give a precise summary nearly every time. Add a few random sentences to that summary and ask the chatbot if the revised summary is accurate, and it will point to the added sentences as the only inaccuracies.

Mr. Altman described the behavior as “reasoning.” But the technology cannot duplicate human reasoning. It is good at analyzing, summarizing and answering complex questions about a book or news article. It is far less adept if asked about events that have not yet happened.

It can write a joke, but it does not show that it understands what will actually make someone laugh. “It doesn’t grasp the nuance of what is funny,” said Oren Etzioni, the founding chief executive of the Allen Institute for AI, a prominent lab in Seattle.

As with similar technologies, users may find ways of coaxing the system into strange and creepy behavior. Asked to imitate another person or playact, this kind of bot sometimes veers into areas it was designed to stay away from.

GPT-4 can also respond to images. Given a photograph, chart or diagram, the technology can provide a detailed, paragraphs-long description of the image and answer questions about its contents. It could be a useful technology for people who are visually impaired.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Brockman showed how the system reacted to images. He gave the new chatbot an image from the Hubble Space Telescope and asked it to describe the photo “in painstaking detail.” It responded with a four-paragraph description, which included an explanation of the ethereal white line that stretched across the photo. A “trail from a satellite or shooting star,” the chatbot wrote.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/14/technology/openai-gpt4-chatgpt.html