Everything You Need to Know About OpenAI’s 2023 Developer Conference

OpenAI finally held its long-anticipated and very first OpenAI Developer Conference on November 6th, 2023. This event was packed with announcements, insights from some of Silicon Valley’s foremost thinkers, and goodies meant to incentivize more people to take up AI development.

Let’s take a more in-depth look at the OpenAI Dev conference and Sam Altman’s keynote address which provided a comprehensive assessment of the latest development and milestones in OpenAI.

Altman’s Opening Remarks

Altman commenced the conference by taking the audience back to a year prior when ChatGPT was being released to the public. Since then, OpenAI has made remarkable strides not only with ChatGPT, but also with the introduction of GPT-4, and later versions such as GPT-4 Turbo that promise to be even more powerful than their predecessors.

Altman made a great note of the broad adoption of OpenAI’s products, with approximately 100 million monthly users, approximately 2 million developers, and an impressive 92% of Fortune 500 companies using OpenAI products in one way or the other.

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Unveiling GPT-4 Turbo

The biggest revelation of the night was probably the announcement of GPT-4 Turbo, a new and improved model that promises several key enhancements. Altman outlined several major improvements all designed to address the specific needs and challenges faced by OpenAI developers. These include:

Extended Context: GPT-4 Turbo promises to have an even greater context length, supporting up to 128,000 tokens. That is 16 times longer than its predecessor. Therefore, GPT-4 Turbo will be able to produce an output of even 300 pages.

Enhanced Control: Developers can now exercise greater control over model responses and outputs. The introduction of JSON mode ensures valid JSON responses, along with improved function calling and reproducible outputs for consistency.

World Knowledge and Retrieval: another key announcement by Altman was the improvement of the existing knowledge cutoff of GPT systems. this has been updated to April 2023. A significant advance in addressing outdated information is the introduction of retrieval. This enables the model to extract knowledge from external documents or databases.

New Modalities: GPT-4 Turbo introduces capabilities such as vision with DALL-E 3, and a text-to-speech model. This new model can accept images as inputs, generating captions and classifications. The text-to-speech model offers natural-sounding audio with six preset voices.

Greater Customization: OpenAI launched Custom Models, a program allowing companies to collaborate with researchers to build tailored models to suit their specific needs. That means that developers will now be able to build their own little versions of GPT.

Higher Rate Limits and Copyright Shield: To enhance accessibility, pricing for GPT-4 Turbo is considerably cheaper than its predecessor. This is based on the current price per token for current corporate users, compared to what the future rates promise to be. Token limits are also doubled for established GPT-4 customers, ultimately making the product cheaper. With Copyright Shield OpenAI has introduced clauses to defend against legal claims related to copyright infringement from the output generated by its model.

Deepening Partnership with Microsoft

Microsoft has invested nearly $13 billion in OpenAI since 2022, and the software giant may be eyeing a bigger stake, no less because OpenAI is finally profitable.

In a significant strategic move, OpenAI announced an increased partnership with Microsoft. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, joined Altman on stage to talk more about the collaboration and the role that Microsoft would be playing in this new paradigm, as a network and hardware provider.

Nadella attested to the complexity of building systems that can support the unique workloads of advanced AI models such as GPT. This partnership is poised to further accelerate innovation and integration of AI technologies into real-world applications.

Upgrades to ChatGPT

It’s not only paying users and AI developers who will benefit from the recent announcements by OpenAI. The usual capabilities of ChatGPT are poised to improve, with additional upgrades such as web browsing, writing and running code, data analysis, and image generation. Regular users will also benefit from the improved knowledge cutoff.

Introducing GPTs and the GPT Store

OpenAI introduced a novel concept called GPTs; these are tailored versions of ChatGPT designed for specific purposes. Users can customize these versions with instructions, extended knowledge, and predefined actions. These GPT agents can be custom-built with zero coding knowledge, and they will also be built using natural language, thus attracting even more developers.

The GPT Store was unveiled and it seems like OpenAI is training its eyes on becoming the first true AI platform. The company will allow users to list and feature their GPTs on the store. Altman also made a note of the future revenue sharing plans, with creators of popular GPT products listed on the store expected to get a cut of the revenues from OpenAI’s store.

Assistants API

The Assistants API allows developers to build AI assistants within their own applications. The API supports three tools, namely, the Code Interpreter, Retrieval, and Function Calling. The conference featured a live demo by an OpenAI researcher that showcased the development of a travel app.

OpenAI unveiled the Assistance API, a groundbreaking tool to simplify the creation of assisted experiences within applications. This API includes features such as persistent threads, built-in retrieval, a code interpreter, and improved function calls. Users can create assistants by defining custom instructions and picking a model. A live demo showcased the development of a travel app with a specialized assistant that seamlessly interacts with users.

Sam Altman concluded the conference with an optimistic outlook on the future of AI. He recapped the key announcements, underscoring the significance of GPTs, the Assistance API, and GPT-4 Turbo. Altman envisioned AI as a technological and societal revolution, empowering users with unprecedented capabilities. He urged developers to start building with these technologies, foreshadowing even more substantial developments on the horizon.

Closing Thoughts

Sam Altman finished his presentation by reiterating that OpenAI was committed to pushing the boundaries of AI whilst sticking to the principles of Artificial General Intelligence or AGI. With new developments such as GPT-4 Turbo, upgrades to ChatGPT, an impending OpenAI app store, and support for developers, OpenAI promises to have an even more fascinating year ahead.

While the events of the developer conference show that OpenAI has grown in leaps and bounds, Sam Altman’s recent firing may be a signal that all isn’t well at the company as the conference portrayed. It will be quite interesting to see how the company will navigate the next year in its quest to breach AGI.