GPT-4 is coming next week and will be multimodal

We expect that GPT-4 will come out in early 2023, and luckily OpenAI will deliver as promised. Microsoft, a big investor in the AI startup, has confirmed that they will reveal the new language model next week, although they haven’t said which day exactly.

Even though most of the technical information will be kept secret until the official announcement, people from Redmond have already revealed an important detail: GPT-4 will have multiple modes.

What does it mean for a language model to be multimodal? It means that it can understand both text and images. The previous version, which powers ChatGPT, can only generate text.

With GPT-4, it will be possible to create text, pictures, and even videos. Andreas Braun, who is the technology director at Microsoft Germany, talked about it in an interview with Heise.

“We will present GPT-4 next week. We will have multimodal models that will offer completely different possibilities. For example, videos.”

Andreas Braun.

Braun describe that GPT-4 as a game changer in the AI industry, because the language model will be one step closer to the ability of humans to understand information. However, it still has a lot of progress to make to catch up to human capabilities.

Another advantage of GPT-4 as a multimodal language model is that it can handle data input and output in different languages. This means that with ChatGPT, you could ask a question in Spanish, but the generated text would be in English. This feature would be very useful for translation tools.

Microsoft says that ChatGPT has had a big impact on people’s daily lives, like the iPhone did more than ten years ago. But even though ChatGPT is popular, they still want to improve the language model that powers it. That’s why they’re paying a lot of attention to the launch of GPT-4.

Microsoft, led by Saya Nadella, has said that GPT-4 is not meant to replace people’s jobs, such as those who work in written media. The main purpose of GPT-4 is to make their work easier or better, not to take it away.

“This is not about replacing jobs, but about doing repetitive tasks in a different way than before.”

Andreas Braun.

Microsoft suggests that companies should teach their employees how to use artificial intelligence in their work. According to Marianne Janik, the director of Microsoft Germany, traditional job descriptions are changing, and new and exciting professions are emerging because of the new possibilities created by AI.