Just got this from OpenAI: gpt-4-0613 is now available, and it adds a new capability — function calling. You describe your functions in the prompt, and the model can intelligently choose to output a JSON object containing the arguments to call them, based on what the user asked for. Perfect for integrating with other tools and APIs.
That’s a drier sentence than the news deserves. Until now, getting a model to operate anything outside the chat window meant coaxing it into a format, parsing whatever came back, and hoping. Now the model has been trained for the job. As TechCrunch reported, the updated models have been fine-tuned to notice when a function is needed and to “respond with JSON that adheres to the function signature.” The same announcement cut prices: the embeddings model down 75 percent to $0.0001 per 1,000 tokens, gpt-3.5-turbo’s input tokens down 25 percent, and a new 16K-context version of gpt-3.5-turbo at $0.003 per 1,000 input tokens.
A concrete case. Ask a model with function calling what the weather is in Boston, and rather than guessing it can hand back a tidy object — the city, the units — for your weather service to fill in, then turn the answer into a sentence. The model stops pretending to know things and starts asking the systems that do.
Now the heads-up, because I keep running into this. I chat with so many people about GPT only to learn they don’t pay the $20 a month for GPT-4. Buy GPT-4. It’s an impossibly valuable investment, and it’s 10X better than 3.5.
The $20 is ChatGPT Plus, which OpenAI launched in February with “general access to ChatGPT even during peak times, faster response times and priority access to new features and improvements.” The new feature that matters is GPT-4 itself. If you’ve only ever used the free tier, you’ve been judging the whole field by its weakest public member, and drawing your conclusions accordingly.
Twenty dollars a month for a chatbot sounds like one more subscription to forget to cancel. It isn’t.
Never before has the cost to intelligence been so trifling.
