OpenAI Unveils GPT-4 Turbo as It Hits a Milestone of 100 Million Weekly Active Users

The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman recently announced that ChatGPT now has a total of 100 million weekly active users. 

He announced during the company's first developer conference which was held in San Francisco on Monday. In the same meeting, Altman unveiled the GPT-4 Turbo, which is considered to be "more powerful" and less expensive than its previous model, the GPT-4. 

He however disclosed that a total of two million developers make use of the platform, including more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies.

OpenAI described the release of GPT-4 Turbo as an improved version of its flagship text-generating AI model, GPT-4, that is considered to be "more powerful" and less expensive. GPT-4 Turbo comes in two versions: the first is strictly used for text-analyzing while the second version is used in understanding the context of both text and images.

The text-analyzing model is available in preview via an API which will start on Monday—OpenAI said it's working towards making both generally available in the weeks to come.

The tech company also announced the 'Assistants API', which it described as a step toward assisting developers build "agent-like experiences" within their apps. Utilizing the 'Assistants API', OpenAI users 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, it reveals.

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, Nairametrics reported.

Also in the conference, Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella spoke about how the tech company's partnership is moving.

He said, 

• 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 also the most computing so that you can keep pushing forward on the frontier.

In rounding up, Nadella said that OpenAI has "the best partnership in tech", while Altman said that: “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 gathered nine hundred developers from around globally to see new tools and exchange ideas. It allows OpenAI 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.