The New GPT-4 AI Gets Top Marks in Law, Medical Exams, OpenAI Claims

Machine learning software company OpenAI just unveiled its newest AI model, GPT-4, and is already making big claims about the “unprecedented” stability and capabilities of the system. 

According to the company, GPT-4 is extremely good at taking standardized tests, according to scores on simulated exams posted by the company. 

In an announcement on Tuesday, OpenAI claimed that GPT-4 scored in the 90th or higher percentiles for the bar exam, the verbal GRE, and the reading and writing portions of the SAT—without specifically training the model for these tests. This means that an automated system took these exams without “studying,” and was able to score higher than the majority of humans. 

According to the company, it could score a 1410 on the SAT, pass the Bar and GREs, and scored all fours and fives on AP Art History, Biology, Calculus BC, and Chemistry exams—high enough to get college credit.

It also, somewhat randomly, did very well on sommelier tests. GPT-4 may have a future in writing the descriptions on the backs of wine bottles. 

GPT-4 is the latest generation of OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer models, which use machine learning to produce text from the material it’s trained on. GPT-3 launched in 2020, and has since generated a lot of buzz around how powerful the model is, how AI could contribute to problems like disinformation, hate speech, and cheating, and whether robots are coming for all of our jobs.  

With the model being open-access, OpenAI’s GPT-3 has been used by companies to create realistic AI companions, mental health counseling, and chatbots that impersonate dead dictators—each with questionably successful results. 

The new GPT-4 will be able to write in multiple coding languages, generate narrative scripts, answer complicated questions with step-by-step instructions, and interact with images, the company claims. 

Founded in 2015 as an open-source, non-profit research group by Silicon Valley investors Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, OpenAI has since become a for-profit company leading the AI arms race—an industry that has resulted in uncertainty in industries like design and news-writing, where AI is increasingly being used to generate content for the internet. 

When OpenAI announced GPT-2 in 2019, it said that it wouldn’t release the training model's source code due to “concerns about malicious applications of the technology.” Three months later, it released the code on Github. 

OpenAI will sell access to GPT-4 on a waitlisted, token-based system.  

“GPT-4 and successor models have the potential to significantly influence society in both beneficial and harmful ways,” OpenAI said in its press release for GPT-4. “We are collaborating with external researchers to improve how we understand and assess potential impacts, as well as to build evaluations for dangerous capabilities that may emerge in future systems.”