Its public release ups the ante as the world’s biggest technology companies vie to make the best artificial intelligence,and smaller firms seek to embed their creations in products from digital tutors to corporate knowledge bases. But it also poses increased risk of the tool being used for cheating by students and the automation of parts of white-collar work.
OpenAI,which created the chatbot sensation ChatGPT,said in a blog post that its latest technology is “multimodal”,meaning images as well as text prompts can spur it to generate content. The text-input feature will be available to subscribers who pay $US20 a month and to software developers,with a waitlist,while the image-input ability remains restricted to its in-house research.
The highly anticipated launch signals how office workers may turn to ever-improving AI for still more tasks,as well as how technology companies are locked in competition to win business from such advances.
Google on Wednesday announced a “magic wand” for its collaboration software that can draft virtually any document. It came days before Microsoft,which has poured billions into OpenAI,is expected to showcase AI for its Word software. A Microsoft executive also said that GPT-4 is helping power its Bing search engine,in a threat to Google’s search dominance.
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OpenAI’s latest technology in some cases represented a vast improvement on a prior version known as GPT-3.5,it said. In a simulation of the bar exam required of US law school graduates before professional practice,the new model scored around the top 10 per cent of test takers,versus the older model ranking around the bottom 10 per cent,OpenAI said.