
The GPT-4 artificial-intelligence model is not yet widely available.Credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Artificial intelligence company OpenAI this week unveiled GPT-4, the latest incarnation of the large language model that powers its popular chat bot ChatGPT. The company says GPT-4 contains big improvements — it has already stunned people with its ability to create human-like text and generate images and computer code from almost any a prompt. Researchers say these abilities have the potential to transform science — but some are frustrated that they cannot yet access the technology, its underlying code or information on how it was trained. That raises concern about the technology’s safety and makes it less useful for research, say scientists.
One upgrade to GPT-4, released on 14 March, is that it can now handle images as well as text. And as a demonstration of its language prowess, Open AI, which is based in