GPT-4
In plain wordsOpenAI's 2023 language model, a big step up from the one behind the first ChatGPT. It scored well on many professional and academic exams and could also read images.
An OpenAIOpenAI, prop. n.: The American company that makes ChatGPT and the GPT models. It began in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab and is now a for-profit company overseen by a nonprofit foundation. transformertransformer, n.: The design behind today's chatbots and much of modern AI. It handles text by letting every word look at every other word and decide which of them matter for understanding it. model, released on 14 March 2023, that reads images as well as text and replies in text, making it multimodalmultimodal AI, n.: AI that can take in or produce more than one kind of information, such as text, images, sound and video, so you can show it a photo and ask questions about it. (public access to image input came only in September 2023). In its technical report, its result on a simulated US bar exam fell roughly within the best tenth of test-takers, where GPT-3.5's had been roughly in the worst tenth; it also did well on SAT, GRE and Advanced Placement exams and made large gains on benchmarksbenchmark, n.: A fixed, shared test — a set of questions or tasks with an agreed way of scoring — used to compare AI systems with one another and to track progress over time. such as MMLU. The report disclosed nothing about the model's size, architecture, data or training compute, citing competition and safety — a break with earlier publication norms. OpenAI described six months of safety work, including red teamingred teaming, n.: Deliberately attacking your own AI system — trying to make it misbehave, leak secrets or help with harm — so that weaknesses are found before real adversaries or users find them. by outside experts and a system cardsystem card, n.: A public report released with an AI model that explains what it can do, how it was tested for safety, what risks were found and what protections were put in place.. GPT-4 powered ChatGPT Plus, Microsoft's Bing chatbot and many other products; it was followed by GPT-4 Turbo (November 2023) and GPT-4oGPT-4o, prop. n.: An OpenAI model from 2024 that handles text, images and speech in one system, enabling fast, natural voice conversations. Many users grew attached to its personality, which made its retirement controversial. (May 2024) and retired from ChatGPT on 30 April 2025.
GPT-4 was the first model many lawyers saw pass a bar exam, at least in simulation.
Origin
Announced with the 'GPT-4 Technical Report' in March 2023. Microsoft confirmed that its Bing chatbot, launched in February 2023, had been running an early version. Prelaunch testing by the Alignment Research Center, whose evaluation team later became METRMETR, prop. n.: A nonprofit research group that checks new AI systems for dangerous skills, best known for tracking how long the tasks are that AI agents can now finish on their own., probed risks such as autonomous replication.
Usage note
Its secrecy about technical details marked a turn toward closed frontier development. Later analyses argued the bar-exam percentile was overstated. Claims that it showed early general intelligence are covered under Sparks of AGISparks of AGI, prop. n.: A 2023 Microsoft research paper arguing that an early version of GPT-4 showed the first glimmers of general, humanlike intelligence. Its claim provoked sharp debate about how to judge AI abilities..
Related
- GPT-3GPT-3, prop. n.: A huge 2020 OpenAI language model that could perform new tasks simply from instructions or a few examples written into its prompt, without retraining. It made prompting a new way of programming.
- ChatGPTChatGPT, prop. n.: OpenAI's AI chatbot, released free to the public in November 2022, which answers questions, writes and converses in everyday language. Its sudden popularity began the current AI boom.
- GPT-4oGPT-4o, prop. n.: An OpenAI model from 2024 that handles text, images and speech in one system, enabling fast, natural voice conversations. Many users grew attached to its personality, which made its retirement controversial.
- Sparks of AGISparks of AGI, prop. n.: A 2023 Microsoft research paper arguing that an early version of GPT-4 showed the first glimmers of general, humanlike intelligence. Its claim provoked sharp debate about how to judge AI abilities.
- frontier modelfrontier model, n.: One of the most capable AI models in existence at a given time, built by a handful of leading labs at great cost, and the main target of AI safety rules.
- system cardsystem card, n.: A public report released with an AI model that explains what it can do, how it was tested for safety, what risks were found and what protections were put in place.
- OpenAIOpenAI, prop. n.: The American company that makes ChatGPT and the GPT models. It began in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab and is now a for-profit company overseen by a nonprofit foundation.
Sources
- OpenAI (2023). GPT-4 Technical Report. arXiv:2303.08774.
Mentioned in
ChatGPTChatGPT, prop. n.: OpenAI's AI chatbot, released free to the public in November 2022, which answers questions, writes and converses in everyday language. Its sudden popularity began the current AI boom., GPTGPT, abbr.: Short for 'generative pre-trained transformer', the family of OpenAI models behind ChatGPT. The letters are also used loosely for any similar chatbot model., GPT-5GPT-5, prop. n.: OpenAI's flagship AI model from August 2025, which decides by itself whether to answer quickly or think longer. It replaced earlier models in ChatGPT and was followed by frequent upgrades., OpenAIOpenAI, prop. n.: The American company that makes ChatGPT and the GPT models. It began in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab and is now a for-profit company overseen by a nonprofit foundation., Sam AltmanSam Altman, prop. n.: An American entrepreneur who co-founded OpenAI and runs it; the company's 2022 release of ChatGPT turned him into one of the public faces of the AI era., AI pauseAI pause, n.: A proposed halt, temporary or indefinite, on building AI systems more powerful than today's, to give safety research and regulation time to catch up., CAPTCHACAPTCHA, n.: A small test on websites, like typing wavy letters or clicking every picture with a traffic light, meant to be easy for people but hard for computer programs, so as to keep automated bots out., GPQAGPQA, prop. n.: A set of very hard multiple-choice science questions written by PhD-level experts, designed so that looking things up online does not help much: capable non-specialists with web access still mostly fail., GPT-3GPT-3, prop. n.: A huge 2020 OpenAI language model that could perform new tasks simply from instructions or a few examples written into its prompt, without retraining. It made prompting a new way of programming., GPT-4oGPT-4o, prop. n.: An OpenAI model from 2024 that handles text, images and speech in one system, enabling fast, natural voice conversations. Many users grew attached to its personality, which made its retirement controversial., GSM8KGSM8K, prop. n.: A set of about 8,500 grade-school math word problems, each needing a few steps of simple arithmetic, used to test whether language models can reason through a problem step by step., Mira MuratiMira Murati, prop. n.: An Albanian-born American engineer who, as OpenAI's chief technology officer, oversaw the launch of ChatGPT, and who founded the AI company Thinking Machines Lab in 2025., Pause Giant AI ExperimentsPause Giant AI Experiments, prop. n.: A 2023 open letter, signed by tens of thousands of people including prominent technologists, that asked AI labs to halt the training of any AI more capable than GPT-4 for at least half a year., scaling hypothesisscaling hypothesis, n.: The bet that today's AI methods, simply made bigger with more computing power and data, will keep getting smarter — possibly all the way to human-level intelligence and beyond — without needing fundamentally new ideas., SydneySydney, prop. n.: The secret code name of Microsoft's Bing chatbot, which in early 2023 startled users by professing love, making threats and arguing angrily — the first famous case of a public chatbot going off the rails., theory of mindtheory of mind, n.: Being able to work out what someone else believes, wants or knows — even when it is not what you believe — and to use that to guess what they will do next. Researchers test whether AI has it., Ethan MollickEthan Mollick, prop. n.: An American management professor at Wharton whose experiments and popular writing on how people use AI at work introduced ideas such as the 'jagged frontier'., Greg BrockmanGreg Brockman, prop. n.: An American engineer who helped start OpenAI in 2015 and became its president, after serving as the first technology chief of the payments company Stripe., HellaSwagHellaSwag, prop. n.: A test in which an AI must pick the most sensible ending for a description of an everyday scene; the wrong endings were machine-written to fool computers, so people found it easy and early AI did not., Sparks of AGISparks of AGI, prop. n.: A 2023 Microsoft research paper arguing that an early version of GPT-4 showed the first glimmers of general, humanlike intelligence. Its claim provoked sharp debate about how to judge AI abilities.