ChatGPT hits 100 million weekly users as OpenAI launches GPT-4 Turbo

The popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT, now has 100 million weekly active users, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Altman made the announcement on Monday at the company’s first developer conference in San Francisco, where it revealed GPT-4 Turbo, a “more powerful” and less expensive version of its flagship text-generating AI model, GPT-4. Altman also revealed that the platform is used by over two million developers, including more than 92% of Fortune 500 organizations.

The GPT-4 Turbo
During the conference, OpenAI debuted GPT-4 Turbo, which it characterized as a “more powerful” and less expensive version of their flagship text-generating AI model, GPT-4. The GPT-4 Turbo is available in two versions: one that only analyzes text and another that recognizes the context of both text and graphics.

Starting Monday, the text-analyzing model will be available in preview via an API, and OpenAI hopes to make both broadly available “in the coming weeks.”

API for developers 

The company also announced ‘Assistants API’, which it described as a step toward helping developers build “agent-like experiences” within their apps. Using the Assistants API, OpenAI customers can build an “assistant” that has specific instructions, leverages outside knowledge, and can call OpenAI generative AI models and tools to perform tasks. Use cases range from a natural language-based data analysis app to a coding assistant or even an AI-powered vacation planner. 

Powering the new Assistants API is Code Interpreter, OpenAI’s tool that writes and runs Python code in a sandboxed execution environment. Launched in March for ChatGPT, Code Interpreter can generate graphs and charts and process files, letting assistants created with the Assistants API run code iteratively to solve code and math problems. 

Microsoft’s commitment 

Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella made a surprise appearance at the conference to talk about how the tech companies partnership was going. 

• “Your mission and our mission is to empower every person on the planet, being able to get the benefits of AI to everyone, and we’re grounded in the fact that safety matters. We commit ourselves deeply to making sure you all as builders of these foundation models have not only the best systems for training and inference but the most compute so that you can keep pushing forward on the frontier,” he said. 

While acknowledging that OpenAi has “the best partnership in tech” in response to Nadella,  Altman pointed out that a “gradual iterative deployment is the best way to address the safety challenges of AI and move forward carefully.” 

• “Eventually, you’ll just ask the computer for what you need, and it’ll do all of these tasks for you,” Altman said. 

The one-day event brought together 900 hundred developers from around the world “to preview new tools and exchange ideas,”. It affords OpenAI the opportunity to entice those developers, showing them how to best integrate OpenAI products into existing applications and entirely new ones – all while ensuring the use of best practices.