ChatGPT-4: faster, more powerful, smarter... and even less eco-friendly

Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI, presented the latest version of ChatGPT to developers live. Its new features are impressive and scary - sometimes both at the same time.

ChatGPT (Big Brother?) sees everything

Here's an interesting example for visually impaired individuals: it is now possible to send an image to ChatGPT so that it can describe it for us. In the demo below, Greg takes a screenshot and asks ChatGPT to describe it.

The robot then accurately describes the content and position of the various elements in the image.

To make his demonstration of the new version of ChatGPT even more impressive, the president of Open AI draws a web interface on a piece of paper with a pen.

He then asks ChatGPT to create an HTML/JS page corresponding to his drawing.

Here is the result:

Impressive, isn't it? The AI even understood that two buttons needed to be inserted to display additional text.

I admit that I only understood the drawing after seeing the result with ChatGPT. The concept of the site: discover jokes by clicking a button to reveal the punchline.

ChatGPT, your future tax advisor?

On the new test interface, it is now possible to provide context to ChatGPT (from the "System" field). The goal is to ask the AI to take on the role of a journalist, tax advisor, lawyer, etc., based on this context. The AI tries to converse in the right tone and with the appropriate knowledge.

In the example above, we ask ChatGPT to become TaxGPT, an intelligent and powerful model trained by OpenAI. Its role? To read and apply tax regulations by detailing its reasoning and results. This is one way to address one of the main criticisms we had of ChatGPT: it never cites its sources.

After transmitting part of the regulation to ChatGPT (in the "Assistant" section), Greg puts the AI to the test with a specific case.

In just a few seconds, ChatGPT is able to perform all the tax calculations and explain its various results, indicating the relevant sections of the regulation...

As for the president of OpenAI, he admitted to having spent a day verifying ChatGPT's (valid) output by scrutinizing the regulations himself.

ChatGPT, super assistant for developers

Another use case has been making a lot of noise lately: between Co-pilot offered by GitHub (based on OpenAI's AI) and ChatGPT, developers have plenty to do.

The new version of ChatGPT seems smarter. However, all of its knowledge (corpus) dates back to before September 2021. In the world of development, updates are frequent, as are the publication of documentation.

Greg then demonstrates how ChatGPT 4 circumvents the problem, by asking it to create a robot on Discord. However, Discord has modified the message sending function. The code produced is therefore incorrect and generates an error.

Nevertheless, all you have to do is copy-paste the error into ChatGPT for it to correct the code by itself. You don't even need to explain to it that there is an update.

Microsoft boosts its capacity to host AI

Microsoft has been sending out press releases in recent days announcing that the company has the physical resources to train AIs and run them on super-servers. This is a way of inviting new startups to enter this lucrative field. Microsoft has even regained its health on the stock market thanks to this judicious investment.

Behind the impressive ChatGPT are therefore huge server farms. That's the equivalent of several football stadiums filled with powerful computers.

Inside are endless corridors hosting numerous server cabinets.

To reduce the use of air conditioning and reduce its carbon footprint, Microsoft uses the following method to manage the heat generated by its supercomputers. The company submerges its servers in a liquid that reduces the overheating of the components - and the result is quite impressive.

Source: Microsoft

Indeed, the generated heat is such that the liquid in question starts to boil. With ChatGPT, you could cook kilos of pasta!

Keep in mind a few images when using ChatGPT: this tool requires a lot of resources and energy to operate.

How to test ChatGPT-4 for free?

The Quora platform, famous for answering all of the Web's questions, has created a service named Poe. This service lists conversational AI like ChatGPT and allows users to test them. All you have to do is create an account and you're good to go.

Since ChatGPT is very popular, its servers are extremely busy. It is therefore only possible to interact with it once a day. It's better than nothing. Otherwise, you have to pay by subscribing to ChatGPT Plus, and sign up for the waiting list.

In this regard, ChatGPT-4 is much more expensive than its predecessors because it requires much more resources:

A token is a piece of words. For example, a paragraph is equivalent to 35 tokens.

Prices are starting to rise slightly. I think the cost is still incredibly low: this will encourage many organizations to start using OpenAI's APIs. This will inevitably increase the energy bill.

Moreover, if you plan to implement such an AI in your company, make sure to inform your users. It is highly likely that all data transmitted to the AI will be reexploited...

If you want to see the demonstration for yourself, the complete live video is available on Youtube.

[Cover photo: DeepMind - retrieved from Unsplash]