In early 2023, ChatGPT became the fastest growing internet application in history when it clocked up 100 million users only two months after launch. In parallel, its popularisation of artificial intelligence saw the term ‘AI’ designated ‘word of the year’ by Collins Dictionary for 2023, while the share price of associated computer chip maker Nvidia similarly soared and fears over the technology were at the heart of the US writers and actors’ strikes.
All this was triggered by the release of the 3.5 free version of the large language model (LLM), which draws on some 175 billion parameters to deliver its text responses. By contrast, ChatGPT 4 – available via subscription since March 2023 – has over a trillion parameters at its disposal and is also multimodal, meaning it can input and output between text, images and voice.
In February this year, Microsoft-backed OpenAI unveiled Sora, “an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions” – a tool essentially capable of turning script into multimedia instantaneously.
