Updated on February 22, 2024
November 30, 2022 was a day of silent revolution.
We all woke up to ChatGPT, which was a general purpose chatbot, which was silently released by a then-unknown company called OpenAI.
But the app quickly caught fire.
In just 5 days, the chatbot had gained an impressive 1 million users. To put things in perspective, it took Netflix 3.5 years and Twitter 24 months to reach this landmark.
By February 2023, the chatbot set the record of becoming the fastest growing consumer app in the history of the internet, according to this Reuters report.
Fast forward to March 2023, and Open AI officially launched the much awaited ChatGPT 4, powered by the GPT4 engine.
So how is the new version of ChatGPT different from the earlier version of Chat GPT 3.5?
We explore all the major differences in this blog post.
For those of you who want to read more on ChatGPT, check out this blog post that we wrote a few days after the launch of ChatGPT.
And if you are short on time, here is the executive summary:
- ChatGPT4 is multimodal – it can process images!
- Has more processing power compared to ChatGPT 3.5
- ChatGPT4 is much more “nuanced.”
- Accuracy improvement in ChatGPT4.
Let us explore each of these differences in detail.
1. ChatGPT 4 is multimodal
A major limitation of ChatGPT 3.5 was that it was “unimodal”. In the sense the chatbot only understands and interprets text input. ChatGPT 4 is much more advanced since the GPT 4 engine powers it, which is multimodal.
ChatGPT 4 can now understand and process even images, and it accepts both text and image prompts. In a developer livestream organized by OpenAI, Greg Brockman, one of the co-founders, showed how powerful ChatGPT 4’s image processing capabilities actually are.
Greg held up a photo for a joke website for which he needs code, and then sent it to ChatGPT 4.
The chatbot then processed this image, and generated an entire Javascript code for the website within a few seconds.
This is how the code and the final website looks like:
Not bad for an LLM no? The applications of this technology are revolutionary, and entire websites can now be coded in a matter of hours, if not minutes.
Programmers beware – ChatGPT 4 just upped the game. Of course, the chatbot still cannot generate images, and is only capable of accepting image inputs at the moment.
Difference no.2: ChatGPT 4 has much more processing power compared to ChatGPT 3.5
When it comes to the sheer processing power or the ability to solve complex scientific and mathematical problems, ChatGPT 4 is way ahead of ChatGPT 3.5.
ChatGPT 4 can solve various problems and equations in subjects as varied as calculus, geometry and algebra. ChatGPT 3.5 on the other hand, can only give us the direction we must take to solve the problem, rather than providing the actual solution.
To put both the models to the test, we asked both ChatGPT 3.5 and ChatGPT 4 to calculate the trajectory of a projectile under the influence of gravity and incorporating air resistance.
This is the response that ChatGPT 3.5 generated.
ChatGPT 4 on the other hand went ahead and gave the actual Runge Kutta method for solving this problem.
ChatGPT4 can also analyze complex scientific concepts and can simulate entire chemical reactions based on inputs. If you are a science enthusiast, then ChatGPT 4 can act as a very good personal assistant, giving you solutions to actual problems much faster than search engines.
Difference no.3: ChatGPT 4 responses are much more “nuanced.”
One major drawback of ChatGPT 3.5 was that it was failing to understand the subtle nuances when it came to natural human language. ChatGPT 3.5 was not able to “get” jokes or sarcasm.
When it comes to creativity, ChatGPT 4 has leapfrogged far ahead of its predecessor. ChatGPT 4 can produce improved poems or essays with much better coherence and creativity.
A major reason behind this advanced capability is that ChatGPT4 has an improved context window. ChatGPT4 can now retain up to 25,000 words of chats for context from chats, while ChatGPT 3.5 has a mere 3000 words.
Check out this poem that we found on Reddit that ChatGPT 4 wrote, around traffic lights.
We gave the same prompt to ChatGPT 3.5, and the poem, although rhyming, was far less creative
ChatGPT4 even writes good short stories and essays, based on the prompts that you give it. This can also extend to novels, where ChatGPT4 can churn out novels with well thought out plot and character development, features that ChatGPT 3.5 had difficulty with.
Difference 4: ChatGPT 4 is more Accurate, less prone to “hallucinations.”
ChatGPT 3.5 was based on the GPT 3.5 engine, which received training on over 175 billion training parameters. ChatGPT 4 took this training one step further, and is purportedly trained on over a trillion parameters. What does this mean?
This means that ChatGPT4 will consider those trillion parameters before formulating a response. When ChatGPT 3.5 was initially released, there were instances where people were asking the chatbot ways to hack into banking websites and known vulnerabilities in other popular sites. This will not be possible in ChatGPT4.
Other topics that ChatGPT4 will stay clear of are:
- Party politics – ChatGPT will not get into a debate arguing one political party is better than the next, and will stay objective in its responses.
- Creating malware: Unlike ChatGPT 3.5, you cannot use ChatGPT 4 to create malware, and OpenAI has put in measures to check this.
- War and physical violence: ChatGPT will not pass comments on, say, the Ukraine war.
These are just some of the areas where ChatGPT does not understand the user input, just like a regular chatbot. In such cases, large language models (LLMs) provide what are known as “ hallucinations.” This is because the model relies on primary learning data or knowledge patterns to generate responses.
According to a tweet by Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, ChatGPT 4 “hallucinates significantly less.”
If you wish to see a video summary of everything we have discussed this far, check out this video:
Final words
We have talked about how ChatGPT 4 is way more advanced compared to ChatGPT 3.5. But there is a catch!! ChatGPT 4 is the paid version, and will set you back by $20 every month. If you are an enterprise that uses the advanced chatbot to churn out content pieces and generate code, then this may be a trivial sum. For the rest of the AI enthusiasts, ChatGPT 3.5 still remains the only way to get on the generative AI bandwagon.
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