OpenAI has announced the general availability of GPT-4, its latest text-generating model, through its API, making the technology available for developers.

According to a blog post by the company, all current developers of the OpenAI API, who have a proven track record of successful payments; will have access to GPT-4. Additionally, the company intends to expand access to new developers by the end of this month. Subsequently, they plan to gradually increase the availability limits based on the availability of computing resources.

“Millions of developers have requested access to the GPT-4 API since March, and the range of innovative products leveraging GPT-4 is growing every day,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. “We envision a future where chat-based models can support any use case.”

The move follows a report that ChatGPT is losing consumer interest as the number of people visiting the AI chatbot’s website and downloading its app declines for the first time since its launch in November.

GPT-4, the latest iteration of the OpenAI language model, offers enhanced capabilities compared to its predecessor, GPT-3.5. It can generate text, including code, and accept both image and text inputs. It has demonstrated performance at a “human level” across various professional and academic benchmarks. Similar to previous GPT models, GPT-4 was trained using publicly available data and licensed data obtained by OpenAI.

However, the image-understanding feature of GPT-4 is currently being tested with a single partner, Be My Eyes, and there is no specific timeline mentioned for its wider availability to other customers, according to Yahoo.

OpenAI has plans to enable developers to fine-tune GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 Turbo, another text-generating model, using their own data. This capability, which has been available for several of OpenAI’s text-generating models, is expected to be rolled out later this year.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of generative AI, competition has intensified. Anthropic, for instance, expanded the context window of its text-generating AI model, Claude, from 9,000 tokens to 100,000 tokens, according to Yahoo.

The context window refers to the amount of text the model considers before generating additional text, while tokens represent units of raw text. GPT-4 previously held the record for a context window size of 32,000 tokens. Models with smaller context windows tend to “forget” recent conversation content, resulting in deviations from the desired topic.

Competition appears to have given chatbot users a variety of options, tanking OpenAI’s consumer rating. In June, global traffic to the website of ChatGPT experienced a decline of 9.7% compared to the previous month, as reported by SimilarWeb, an internet data firm. Additionally, data from Sensor Tower reveals a consistent decrease in downloads of the ChatGPT iPhone app since its peak in early June, following its launch in May.

In a similar announcement, OpenAI said it’s making some changes in the general availability of its DALL-E 2 and Whisper APIs. DALL-E 2 is OpenAI’s model for generating images, while “Whisper” refers to the company’s speech-to-text model.

To optimize its compute capacity, OpenAI has also revealed plans to deprecate older models offered through its API. This decision comes as a response to the overwhelming demand for OpenAI’s generative models, particularly driven by the immense popularity of ChatGPT.

Effective January 4, 2024, certain older OpenAI models, including GPT-3 and its derivatives, will no longer be accessible. They will be replaced by new “base GPT-3” models, presumably designed to enhance compute efficiency. Developers currently utilizing the old models will be required to manually update their integrations before January 4.

“We will be providing support to users who previously fine-tuned models to make this transition as smooth as possible,” OpenAI wrote. “In the coming weeks, we will reach out to developers who have recently used these older models, and will provide more information once the new completion models are ready for early testing.”

If you check the top 20 digital technology companies in the world, one thing is very consistent: they share a business model. Business model encapsulates how a company makes money and captures value. To a large extent, making and committing a company to a business model is the most important decision a CEO or an executive management is tasked to make. 

In this Tekedia Mini-MBA module, in a 53-page course material, I explain most of the most common business models in our time. During this Zoom Live session, I will focus on cases on some dominant ones. Yes, the business model you commit a company to contributes to a significant level if you would be successful in that business (check my Harvard article on this here) .

Meanwhile, we have opened registration for the next Tekedia Mini-MBA which begins Sept 11. Go here and register today and get the early registration discounts.

In the scheme of things, you can have many models at the end of a strategy session. The business model you commit your business to has a catalytic impact on your success. In other words,  the business model is supreme. Yes, the company has been bleeding revenue, but they changed the CEO. Magically, using the same staff on the products, the revenue started going north. What happened? A new business model has been deployed.

Few weeks back, Meta boss, Mark Zuckerberg, had challenged Tesla and Twitter boss, Elon Musk, to a friendly cage fight. Despite being a neophyte in combat, Musk accepted the challenge and showed his willingness to train as much as it would require him to be able take-on Zuckerberg who on the contrary is well groomed and decorated in Jitsu.

The proposed faceoff between Zuckerberg and Musk picked a lot of people’s interest and raised positive reactions in the media. Many internet users across different social media platforms said they could not wait to see the duo get physical and exhibit their combat skills on stage to the amusement of their viewers.

But it appears the dynamic between the two entrepreneurs is currently taking a different turn. Twitter has recently made a law suit threat to Meta for alleged copyright infringement following Meta’s unveiling of its new social networking platform, Thread, which provides alternative services of the twitter’s. Daubed the copycat app, Thread has been alleged to have been crafted out of Twitter’s trade secret. Twitter’s team of lawyers claimed in a letter sent to Zuckerberg that Meta recruited former Twitter employees who used twitter trade secrets to develop thread.

In a tweet, Musk conveyed his dissatisfaction at the revelation, saying: ” competition is fine. But cheating is not.”

However, Twitter’s claim that Meta enlisted its former employees who championed the development of the thread app, regardless of its correctness and legal implication, underscores the importance of human resource in the survivability and sustainability of a business. Apparently, when people move from companies to companies within the same industry, they move along with knowledge and insights which they consciously or unconsciously use to help their new companies to have a competitive edge.

Could Zuckerberg’s combat challenge with Musk be interpreted as a metaphor foreshadowing what is to transpire between the two social media behemoths, Twitter and Meta? My answer is an emphatic Yes.

It is like picturing the earliest periods of the ancient Chinese and Japanese dynasties where two great generals of two great empires invite each other for a fun game in preparation for a battle or partnership between the two empires at an unknown time in the future.

Meanwhile, Musk’s SpaceX business continues to grow.

Twitter and Tesla have had their ups and downs, but it’s been smoother sailing at another Elon Musk-led firm: SpaceX. The company is effectively monopolizing the global space market thanks to “a proven fleet of reusable rockets that can fly at a pace that rivals can’t match,” The Wall Street Journal writes. It has led 21 launches for outside clients so far this year — almost two-thirds of the world’s commercial space flights — and Musk has estimated that SpaceX will account for 80% of the mass that makes it into orbit in 2023. SpaceX-owned Starlink internet satellites had to “swerve more than 25,000 times” from December 2022 through May 2023 to stay clear of potential collisions, according to a new regulatory report.