GPT-4 Is Released

OpenAI released GPT-4 in March 2023. It improved substantially over earlier GPT models on complex instructions and many academic-style tests, and OpenAI demonstrated that it could accept images as well as text as input.

Unlike earlier papers, OpenAI did not disclose the model’s parameter count, architecture details, training compute, or dataset composition. That secrecy marked a shift as frontier language models became expensive commercial systems rather than primarily academic research artifacts.

GPT-4 also accelerated a new software architecture: applications could delegate reasoning, extraction, coding, and natural-language interaction to a remote model API. This was powerful but introduced new dependencies on latency, model behavior, provider pricing, and nondeterministic outputs.