GPT-4 (2023) › 2023: GPT-4

OpenAI released GPT-4 in March 2023 as a model that accepted text and image inputs and produced text. Its technical report emphasized benchmark gains over GPT-3.5, including reported scores around the 90th percentile on the Uniform Bar Exam and 88th percentile on the LSAT. These results measured performance on specific test sets; they did not establish general reasoning ability or professional competence.

GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 had shown that one pretrained model could perform many tasks from instructions or examples in the prompt. They also produced inconsistent answers, hallucinated facts, and accepted text rather than images. GPT-4 was presented as an attempt to improve benchmark performance, instruction following, and safety behavior while adding image input.

OpenAI reported using supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), adversarial testing, and additional safety mitigations. These methods improved measured behavior but did not eliminate hallucinations, harmful outputs, or performance variation across tasks.

The release drew attention to multimodal input, stronger benchmark results, and systematic safety evaluation in a general-purpose language model. It was not evidence that artificial general intelligence had been achieved.