酒店英语SAN FRANCISCO — Four months ago, a small San Francisco company became the talk of the technology industry when it introduced a new online chatbot that could answer complex questions, write poetry and even mimic human emotions.
旧金山——四个月前，旧金山的一家小公司推出了一款新型在线聊天机器人，成为科技行业的热门话题。这款聊天机器人可以回答复杂的问题、写诗甚至模仿人类情感。
Now the company is back with a new version of the technology that powers its chatbots. The system will up the ante in Silicon Valley’s race to embrace artificial intelligence and decide who will be the next generation of leaders in the technology industry.
现在，该公司又推出了驱动其聊天机器人的技术的新版本。该系统将促使硅谷愈发增加在人工智能上的押注，并决定谁将成为技术行业的下一代领导者。
OpenAI, which has around 375 employees but has been backed with billions of dollars of investment from Microsoft and industry celebrities, said Tuesday that it had released a technology that it calls GPT-4. It was designed to be the underlying engine that powers chatbots and all sorts of other systems, from search engines to personal online tutors.
OpenAI周二表示，它已经发布了一项名为GPT-4的技术。该公司拥有约375名员工，但得到了微软和行业知名人士数十亿美元的投资支持。GPT-4旨在成为驱动聊天机器人和从搜索引擎到网络私人辅导等各种其他系统的底层引擎。
Most people will use this technology through a new version of the company’s ChatGPT chatbot, while businesses will incorporate it into a wide variety of systems, including business software and e-commerce websites. The technology already drives the chatbot available to a limited number of people using Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
大多数人将通过该公司的新版ChatGPT聊天机器人用到这项技术，而企业会将其整合到各种系统中，包括商业软件和电子商务网站。微软必应搜索引擎的部分用户可以使用的聊天机器人已经由该技术驱动。
OpenAI’s progress has, within just a few months, landed the technology industry in one of its most unpredictable moments in decades. Many industry leaders believe developments in AI represent a fundamental technological shift, as important as the creation of web browsers in the early 1990s. The rapid improvement has stunned computer scientists.
在短短几个月内，OpenAI的进步就让科技行业身陷几十年来最不可预测的时刻之一。许多行业领导者认为，人工智能的发展代表了一种根本性的技术转变，其重要性可媲美20世纪90年代初期网络浏览器的发明。这种快速进步让计算机科学家感到惊讶。
GPT-4, which learns its skills by analyzing huge amounts of data culled from the internet, improves on what powered the original ChatGPT in several ways. It is more precise. It can, for example, ace the Uniform Bar Exam, instantly calculate someone’s tax liability and provide detailed descriptions of images.
GPT-4通过分析从互联网上收集的大量数据来学习技能，在多个方面改进了驱动最初的ChatGPT功能的引擎。它更精确。例如，它可以在美国律师协会考试中取得高分，立即计算出某人的应纳税额，还能对图像进行详细的描述。
But OpenAI’s new technology still has some of the strangely humanlike shortcomings that have vexed industry insiders and unnerved people who have worked with the newest chatbots. It is an expert on some subjects and a dilettante on others. It can do better on standardized tests than most people and offer precise medical advice to doctors, but it can also mess up basic arithmetic.
但OpenAI的新技术仍然存在一些奇怪的类似人类的缺点，这些缺点让业内人士和使用过最新聊天机器人的人感到不安。它是某些学科的专家，而对另一些学科则是外行。它可以在标准化测试中比大多数人做得更好，并为医生提供精确的医疗建议，但同时它连基础的算术题都会做错。
Companies that bet their futures on the technology may — at least for now — have to put up with imprecision, which was long taboo in an industry built from the ground up on the notion that computers are more exacting than their human creators.
至少在目前看来，将自己的未来押在这项技术上的公司可能不得不忍受这种不精确，这在这个行业中一直是一种禁忌，该行业从一开始就建立在计算机比它的人类创造者更严谨的概念之上。
“I don’t want to make it sound like we have solved reasoning or intelligence, which we certainly have not,” Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, said in an interview. “But this is a big step forward from what is already out there.”
“我不想听起来像是我们已经解决了推理或智能问题，我们当然还没有解决这些问题，”OpenAI的CEO山姆·奥特曼在接受采访时说。“但与现有的相比，这是向前迈出的一大步。”
Other tech companies are likely to include GPT-4’s features in an array of products and services, including Microsoft’s software for performing business tasks and e-commerce sites that want to give customers new ways of virtually trying out their products. A number of industry giants like Google and Facebook’s parent company, Meta, are also working on their own chatbots and AI technology.
其他科技公司可能会在一系列产品和服务中加入GPT-4的功能，包括微软用于执行业务任务的软件，以及希望为客户提供虚拟试用产品新方式的电子商务网站。许多行业巨头，如谷歌和Facebook的母公司Meta，也在开发自己的聊天机器人和人工智能技术。
ChatGPT and similar technologies are already shifting the behavior of students and educators who are trying to understand whether the tools should be embraced or banned. Because the systems can write computer programs and perform other business tasks, they are also on the cusp of changing the nature of work.
ChatGPT和类似技术已经在改变学生和教育工作者的行为，他们尝试了解这些工具应该被接受还是禁止。由于该系统可以编程并执行其他业务任务，它们正处于令工作的本质发生转变的临界点。
Even the most impressive systems tend to complement skilled workers rather than replace them. The systems cannot be used in lieu of doctors, lawyers or accountants. Experts are still needed to spot their mistakes. But they could soon replace some paralegals (whose work is reviewed and edited by trained lawyers), and many AI experts believe they will replace workers who moderate content on the internet.
即使是最出色的系统也倾向于辅助而不是取代熟练工人。这些系统不能取代医生、律师或会计师。仍然需要专家来纠错。但它们很快就会取代一些律师助理（这类工作由训练有素的律师审查和修订），许多人工智能专家认为它们将取代在互联网上的内容管理者。
“There is definitely disruption, which means some jobs go away and some new jobs get created,” said Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president. “But I think the net effect is that barriers to entry go down, and the productivity of the experts goes up.”
“肯定会出现混乱，这意味着一些工作岗位会消失，一些新的工作岗位会出现，”OpenAI总裁格雷格·布罗克曼说。“但我认为，最终的结果是，进入门槛下降，专家的生产率提高。”
On Tuesday, OpenAI started selling access to GPT-4 so that businesses and other software developers could build their own applications on top of it. The company has also used the technology to build a new version of its popular chatbot, which is available to anyone who purchases access to ChatGPT Plus — a subscription service priced at $20 a month.
周二，OpenAI开始销售GPT-4的访问权限，以便企业和其他软件开发人员可以在其基础上构建自己的应用程序。该公司还利用这项技术构建了其受欢迎的聊天机器人的新版本，任何人只要购买ChatGPT Plus的访问权就可以使用，这是一项每月收费20美元的订阅服务。
Like similar technologies, the new system sometimes “hallucinates.” It generates completely false information without warning. Asked for websites that lay out the latest in cancer research, it might give several internet addresses that do not exist.
和类似技术一样，新系统有时也会“产生幻觉”。它会毫无征兆地产生完全错误的信息。当被问及发布最新癌症研究成果的网站时，它可能会给出几个不存在的网址。
GPT-4 is a neural network, a type of mathematical system that learns skills by analyzing data. It is the same technology that digital assistants like Siri use to recognizes spoken commands and self-driving cars use to identify pedestrians.
GPT-4是一种神经网络，一种通过分析数据来学习技能的数学系统，这也是Siri等数字助理用来识别语音命令的技术，以及自动驾驶汽车用来识别行人的技术。
Around 2018, companies like Google and OpenAI began building neural networks that learned from enormous amounts of digital text, including books, Wikipedia articles, chat logs and other information posted to the internet. They are called large language models, or LLMs.
2018年左右，谷歌和OpenAI等公司开始构建神经网络，从大量数字文本中学习，包括书籍、维基百科文章、聊天记录和其他发布到互联网上的信息。它们被称为大型语言模型(LLM)。
By pinpointing billions of patterns in all that text, the LLMs learn to generate text on their own, including tweets, poems and computer programs. OpenAI threw more and more data into its LLM More data, the company hoped, would mean better answers.
通过精确定位所有文本中的数十亿种模式，大型语言模型学会了自己生成文本，包括推文、诗歌和计算机程序。OpenAI向大型语言模型注入了越来越多的数据，希望更多的数据意味着更好的答案。
The original ChatGPT was based on a large language model called GPT-3.5. OpenAI’s GPT-4 learned from significantly larger amounts of data.
最初的ChatGPT基于一个称为GPT-3.5的大型语言模型。OpenAI的GPT-4学习的数据规模还要大得多。
OpenAI executives declined to disclose just how much data the new chatbot had learned from, but Brockman said the data set was “internet scale,” meaning it spanned enough websites to provide a representative sample of all English speakers on the internet.
OpenAI高管拒绝透露这款新型聊天机器人从多少数据中学习，但布罗克曼表示，数据集是“互联网规模”的，这意味着它涵盖了足够多的网站，它们可以为互联网所有英语使用者提供一个具有代表性的样本。
GPT-4’s new capabilities may not be obvious to the average person first using the technology. But they are likely to quickly come into focus as laypeople and experts continue to use the service.
GPT-4的新功能对于初次使用这项技术的普通人来说可能并不明显。但随着普通人和专家继续使用这项服务，它们可能很快就会成为人们关注的焦点。
Given a lengthy article from The New York Times and asked to summarize it, the bot will give a precise summary nearly every time. Add a few random sentences to that summary and ask the chatbot if the revised summary is accurate, and it will point to the added sentences as the only inaccuracies.
给它一篇来自《纽约时报》的长篇文章并要求它进行摘要，机器人几乎每次都会给出精确的结果。如果在这份摘要中添加一些随机的句子，并询问聊天机器人修改后的摘要是否准确，它会指出，添加的句子是唯一不准确的地方。
GPT-4 can also respond to images. Given a photograph, chart or diagram, the technology can provide a detailed, paragraphs-long description of the image and answer questions about its contents. It could be a useful technology for people who are visually impaired.
GPT-4还可以对图像做出响应。给出一张照片、图表或示意图，该技术可以提供详细的、长达数段的图像描述，并回答有关其内容的问题。这可能是一项对视力障碍者有用的技术。
OpenAI executives said the company was not immediately releasing the image description part of the technology because they were unsure how it could be misused.
OpenAI高管表示暂时不会发布该技术的图像描述部分，因为他们不确定会被如何滥用。
Building and serving up chatbots is enormously expensive. Because it is trained on even larger amounts of data, OpenAI’s new chatbot will increase the company’s costs. Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, said the company could curtail access to the service if it generated too much traffic.
构建和提供聊天机器人是非常昂贵的。由于OpenAI的新聊天机器人接受了更多的数据训练，会增加公司的成本。OpenAI首席技术官米拉·穆拉蒂表示，如果该服务产生过多流量，公司可能会限制用户使用该服务。
But in the long term, OpenAI plans to build and deploy systems that can juggle multiple types of media, including sound and video as well as text and images.
但从长远来看，OpenAI计划构建和部署能够处理多种媒体类型的系统，包括声音和视频，以及文本和图像。
“We can take all these general-purpose knowledge skills and spread them across all sorts of different areas,” Brockman said. “This takes the technology into a whole new domain.”
“我们可以把所有这些通用知识技能推广到各种不同的领域，”布罗克曼说。“这会把技术带入一个全新的领域。”
