Introducing GPT-4

The GPT-4 launch post (March 2023) is the announcement that changed the terms of the AI debate from "when will this matter?" to "how do we handle this now?" GPT-4 passed the bar exam at the 90th percentile, scored 5s on multiple AP exams, and demonstrated capabilities no previous language model had shown in multi-modal reasoning. Altman's framing was deliberately careful: the post emphasizes what GPT-4 can't do (it is not reliable for high-stakes factual claims, it still hallucinates, it cannot reliably reason about novel real-world situations) as much as what it can. This reflects Altman's stated strategy of "deploying incrementally so society can adapt" — framing GPT-4 as impressive but limited rather than transformative and final. The technical report accompanying the launch became notable for what it omitted: OpenAI declined to publish training data, compute estimates, or architecture details, a significant departure from their earlier transparency norms. This was the first major signal that the "open" in OpenAI was a historical artifact, not a current policy. The launch created the competitive dynamics that dominated 2023–2024: Google accelerated Bard/Gemini, Anthropic launched Claude, Meta open-sourced LLaMA. GPT-4 is the document that made AI an executive priority at every major company.