GPT-4 Is Exciting and Scary (Published 2023) (2024)

When I opened my laptop on Tuesday to take my first run at GPT-4, the new artificial intelligence language model from OpenAI, I was, truth be told, a little nervous.

After all, my last extended encounter with an A.I. chatbot — the one built into Microsoft’s Bing search engine — ended with the chatbot trying to break up my marriage.

It didn’t help that, among the tech crowd in San Francisco, GPT-4’s arrival had been anticipated with near-messianic fanfare. Before its public debut, for months rumors swirled about its specifics. “I heard it has 100 trillion parameters.” “I heard it got a 1,600 on the SAT.” “My friend works for OpenAI, and he says it’s as smart as a college graduate.”

These rumors may not have been true. But they hinted at how jarring the technology’s abilities can feel. Recently, one early GPT-4 tester — who was bound by a nondisclosure agreement with OpenAI but gossiped a little anyway — told me that testing GPT-4 had caused the person to have an “existential crisis,” because it revealed how powerful and creative the A.I. was compared with the tester’s own puny brain.

GPT-4 didn’t give me an existential crisis. But it exacerbated the dizzy and vertiginous feeling I’ve been getting whenever I think about A.I. lately. And it has made me wonder whether that feeling will ever fade, or whether we’re going to be experiencing “future shock” — the term coined by the writer Alvin Toffler for the feeling that too much is changing, too quickly — for the rest of our lives.

For a few hours on Tuesday, I prodded GPT-4 — which is included with ChatGPT Plus, the $20-a-month version of OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT — with different types of questions, hoping to uncover some of its strengths and weaknesses.