The AI Wire ●

At its first developer conference, OpenAI announced GPT-4 Turbo: a faster, cheaper GPT-4 with a 128K-token context window — roughly 300 pages of text — and knowledge updated to April 2023. API pricing dropped significantly, a direct response to developer complaints about GPT-4's cost.

DevDay also introduced GPTs — custom chatbots anyone could build without code — and the GPT Store concept. The message was clear: OpenAI wanted an app ecosystem on top of its models, not just a chatbot.

The event was overshadowed days later by the board's brief firing of Sam Altman, but GPT-4 Turbo itself became the workhorse model of the GPT-4 era, powering ChatGPT Plus for over a year.

OpenAI launched GPT-4, its first flagship successor to the model behind ChatGPT. It was multimodal from the start — accepting image inputs alongside text — and dramatically stronger at reasoning, instruction-following, and exams, scoring in the top 10% on a simulated bar exam.

GPT-4 debuted for ChatGPT Plus subscribers and as a waitlisted API, with 8K and later 32K context variants. Microsoft confirmed its new Bing chat was already running on GPT-4, making it the quiet engine of the search industry's AI pivot.

The release also marked a shift in OpenAI's openness: the company published a system card and red-teaming results but disclosed almost nothing about architecture, training data, or model size — a stance that drew criticism from researchers.

OpenAI released ChatGPT as a free research preview, a conversational interface built on a GPT-3.5-series model. It could answer questions, write essays and code, and hold extended back-and-forth conversations — and it exploded, reaching an estimated 100 million users within two months, the fastest-growing consumer app in history at the time.

The launch kicked off the modern AI race overnight. Google declared a 'code red' within weeks, Microsoft deepened its OpenAI partnership, and every major lab reorganized around conversational AI.

ChatGPT's underlying model was GPT-3.5, an instruction-tuned evolution of GPT-3. It set the template for everything that followed: the chat interface, RLHF-tuned assistants, and the Plus subscription tier that arrived the following February.