When OpenAI announced GPT-4, its latest large language model, last March, it sent shockwaves through the tech world. It was clearly more capable than anything seen before at chatting, coding, and solving all sorts of thorny problems—including school homework. Anthropic, a rival to OpenAI, announced today that it has made its own AI advance that will upgrade chatbots and other use cases. But although the new model is the world’s best by some measures, it’s more of a step forward than a big leap.
“If you look at the rate of change in intelligence you’ll appreciate how fast we’re moving,” Gerstenhaber says. More than a year after GPT-4 spurred a frenzy of new investment in AI, it may be turning out to be more difficult to produce big new leaps in machine intelligence. With GPT-4 and similar models trained on huge swathes of online text, imagery, and video, it is getting more difficult to find new sources of data to feed to machine-learning algorithms.