In March 2023, OpenAI released GPT-4, the next major version of their Generative Pre-trained Transformer models. It represented a significant step up from previous versions, offering greater power and reliability. While not perfect, it was designed to be a more capable partner in a wide range of tasks, from creative writing to complex problem-solving.

The core improvements focused on three key areas: enhanced creativity, greater reliability, and the ability to handle much more nuanced instructions. It's less likely to make up facts and better at staying on topic, making its outputs more trustworthy and useful for professional applications.

Perhaps the most exciting new feature was its multimodal capability. For the first time, a GPT model could understand more than just text. GPT-4 can analyze the content of images and answer questions about them.

You could, for example, show it a picture of the inside of your refrigerator and ask for dinner recipes based on the ingredients it sees. This ability to blend visual understanding with text-based reasoning opened up a whole new world of possibilities.

This feature allows it to describe graphs, explain memes, and even help people with visual impairments understand what's in a photo. It's a foundational step toward creating AI that can perceive and understand the world more like humans do.

To measure its progress, OpenAI tested GPT-4 on a variety of exams designed for humans. The results were striking. While its predecessor, GPT-3.5, performed well on some tests, it struggled with others. GPT-4, however, demonstrated human-level performance on many academic and professional benchmarks.

It scored in the 90th percentile on the Uniform Bar Exam, a test for aspiring lawyers, a massive jump from GPT-3.5's 10th percentile score. This level of performance was consistent across many different subjects, showcasing a much deeper and more flexible understanding of information.

These scores aren't just about trivia. They show that the model has developed more advanced reasoning capabilities, allowing it to solve problems it has never seen before.

GPT-4's improvements in reliability, reasoning, and its new ability to process images make it a far more powerful and versatile tool than anything that came before it.