GPT-4 arrived in March 2023, a few months after ChatGPT took off, and it was the first model many companies treated as good enough to build products on. It scored far higher than its predecessor on professional and academic exams and accepted images as input.
AI model data sheet: GPT-4
| Developer | OpenAI |
|---|---|
| Released | March 14, 2023 |
| Type | Large multimodal model (text out; image input added) |
| Context window | 8K and 32K tokens at launch |
| Access | ChatGPT Plus and API |
| Licence / weights | Closed, no public weights |
| Best at | Reasoning, writing and coding at a level that reset expectations |
| Why it matters | The model that made the generative AI boom mainstream for business users |
Quick verdict: The benchmark everyone chased in 2023. Historic more than current.
It has since been succeeded by faster, cheaper models, but GPT-4 remains the reference point most later releases are compared against.