Chat GPT-4 Turbo, AI assistants and Microsoft: Everything you need to know about OpenAI upgrades

Chat GPT-4 Turbo, AI assistants and Microsoft: Everything you need to know about OpenAI upgrades

Less than a year into its meteoric rise, the company behind ChatGPT unveiled its vision for the future of its artificial intelligence technology on Monday.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told a crowd of 900 at its first developer conference that “eventually, you’ll just ask the computer for what you need and it’ll do all of these tasks for you”.

This is everything to know about OpenAI’s latest developments.

GPT-4 Turbo

Altman unveiled an improved version of its GPT-4 model, which he said 100 million people are using the earlier version of the tool every week.

The GPT-4 Turbo is the latest version of the popular GPT-4 model, which the company says is more capable and can retrieve information about world and cultural events as recent as April 2023 - unlike previous versions that couldn’t answer questions about anything after 2021.

The new model comes in two versions: one for just text analysis and the other for understanding text and images.

GPT-4 with vision, or GPT-4V, enables the chatbot to analyse images. In a September research paper, the company showed how the tool could describe images to people who are blind or have low vision.

‘AI assistants’

The OpenAI boss also unveiled a new line of chatbot products that can be customized to a variety of tasks and perform like an assistant. The AI apps, called GPTs, can teach maths, tell you how to do your laundry or even make stickers, among other specific tasks.

The company said that it plans to let users publish these GPTs to a store - coming later this month - as well. It will initially have creations from “verified builders”.

Altman also talked about paying people with popular GPTs.

Users will be able to make own customised versions of ChatGPT for specific tasks.The company said a GPT Store will open later this month where people can share their GPTs and earn money based on the number of users.

But Altman described the company’s approach as “gradual iterative deployment” that leaves time to address safety risks.

Developers can build assistants

Assistants API will let developers build their own “agent-like experiences”. It means developers can make agents receive knowledge outside the system, giving them greater control.

OpenAi said you could integrate a travel listings database, connect a user’s email inbox, or facilitate e-commerce orders.

‘The best partnership in tech’

Altman was briefly joined on stage by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who said, amid cheers from the audience, “we love you guys”.

Microsoft has so far invested $10 billion (€9.4 billion) in OpenAI.

In his comments, Nadella emphasised Microsoft’s role as a business partner using its data centres to give OpenAI the computing power it needs to build more advanced models.

“I think we have the best partnership in tech. I’m excited for us to build AGI together,” Altman said, referencing his goal to build so-called artificial general intelligence that can perform just as well as - or even better than - humans in a wide variety of tasks.

Defending from copyright claims

The company also announced a programme called Copyright Shield, which it said will protect businesses using the AI company’s products from copyright claims.