SAN FRANCISCO — Four months ago, a small San Francisco company became the talk of the technology industry when it introduced a new online chatbot that could answer complex questions, write poetry and even mimic human emotions.

Now the company is back with a new version of the technology that powers its chatbots. The system will up the ante in Silicon Valley’s race to embrace artificial intelligence and decide who will be the next generation of leaders in the technology industry.

OpenAI, which has around 375 employees but has been backed with billions of dollars of investment from Microsoft and industry celebrities, said this month that it had released a technology that it calls GPT-4. It was designed to be the underlying engine that powers chatbots and all sorts of other systems, from search engines to personal online tutors.

Most people will use this technology through a new version of the company’s ChatGPT chatbot, while businesses will incorporate it into a wide variety of systems, including business software and e-commerce websites. The technology already drives the chatbot available to a limited number of people using Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

OpenAI’s progress has, within just a few months, landed the technology industry in one of its most unpredictable moments in decades. Many industry leaders believe developments in AI represent a fundamental technological shift, as important as the creation of web browsers in the early 1990s. The rapid improvement has stunned computer scientists.

GPT-4, which learns its skills by analyzing huge amounts of data culled from the internet, improves on what powered the original ChatGPT in several ways. It is more precise. It can, for example, ace the Uniform Bar Exam, instantly calculate someone’s tax liability and provide detailed descriptions of images.

But OpenAI’s new technology still has some of the strangely humanlike shortcomings that have vexed industry …read more

Source:: The Denver Post