OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, has announced that the popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT now has 100 million weekly active users.
Altman disclosed this at the company’s first developer conference in San Francisco on Monday, where it unveiled GPT-4 Turbo, which is a “more powerful” and less expensive version of its flagship text-generating AI model, GPT-4. Altman also disclosed that over two million developers use the platform, including more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies.
GPT-4 Turbo
During the conference, OpenAI unveiled GPT-4 Turbo, which it described as an improved version of its flagship text-generating AI model, GPT-4, that is “more powerful” and less expensive. The GPT-4 Turbo comes in two versions: one that’s strictly text-analyzing and a second version that understands the context of both text and images.
The text-analyzing model is available in preview via an API starting Monday, and OpenAI said it plans to make both generally available “in the coming weeks.”
API for developers
The company also announced ‘Assistants API’, which it described as a step toward helping developers build “agent-like experiences” within their apps. Using the Assistants API, OpenAI customers can build an “assistant” that has specific instructions, leverages outside knowledge, and can call OpenAI generative AI models and tools to perform tasks. Use cases range from a natural language-based data analysis app to a coding assistant or even an AI-powered vacation planner.
Powering the new Assistants API is Code Interpreter, OpenAI’s tool that writes and runs Python code in a sandboxed execution environment. Launched in March for ChatGPT, Code Interpreter can generate graphs and charts and process files, letting assistants created with the Assistants API run code iteratively to solve code and math problems.
Microsoft’s commitment
Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella made a surprise appearance at the conference to talk about how the tech companies partnership was going.
- “Your mission and our mission is to empower every person on the planet, being able to get the benefits of AI to everyone, and we’re grounded in the fact that safety matters. We commit ourselves deeply to making sure you all as builders of these foundation models have not only the best systems for training and inference but the most compute so that you can keep pushing forward on the frontier,” he said.
While acknowledging that OpenAi has “the best partnership in tech” in response to Nadella, Altman pointed out that a “gradual iterative deployment is the best way to address the safety challenges of AI and move forward carefully.”
- “Eventually, you’ll just ask the computer for what you need, and it’ll do all of these tasks for you,” Altman said.
The one-day event brought together 900 hundred developers from around the world “to preview new tools and exchange ideas,”. It affords OpenAI the opportunity to entice those developers, showing them how to best integrate OpenAI products into existing applications and entirely new ones – all while ensuring the use of best practices.