GPT-4 vs. ChatGPT-3.5: What’s the Difference?

pcmag.com:

ChatGPT, the  Natural Language Generation (NLG) tool from OpenAI that auto-generates text, took the tech world by storm late in 2022 (much like its Dall-E image-creation AI did earlier that year). Now, the company's text-creation technology has leveled up to version 4, under the name GPT-4 (GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, a name not even an Autobot would love). But can you use the new technology yet? Why would you want to? Here’s how and why.  

OpenAI has actually been releasing versions of GPT for almost five years(Opens in a new window). It had its first release for public use in 2020, prompting AI announcements from other big names (including Microsoft, which eventually invested in OpenAI).

TechTarget(Opens in a new window) defines parameters as “the parts of a large language model that define its skill on a problem such as generating text.” It’s essentially what the model learns. GPT-1 had 117 million parameters to work with, GPT-2 had 1.5 billion, and GPT-3(Opens in a new window) arrived in February of 2021 with 175 billion parameters. By the time ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022, the tech had reached version 3.5.  As stated above, you’ll still be using GPT-3.5 for a while if you’re using the free version of ChatGPT.

ChatGPT became popular fast. That caused server capacity problems, so it didn’t take long for OpenAI, the company behind it, to offer a paid version of the tech. Which didn’t slow things down very much; ChatGPT (both paid and free versions) eventually attracted as much web traffic as the Bing search engine. There are still moments when basic ChatGPT exceeds capacity—I got one such notification while writing this story.

The paid version is called ChatGPT Plus (or