SAN FRANCISCO: The company behind the ChatGPT app that churns out essays, poems or computing code on command released Tuesday a long-awaited update of its artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

GPT-4 has been widely awaited ever since ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late November, wowing users with its capabilities that were based on an older version of OpenAI’s technology, known as a large language model.

“We’ve created GPT-4, the latest milestone in OpenAI’s effort in scaling up deep learning,” a company blog said, adding that the AI technology “exhibits human-level performance” on some professional and academic tasks.

With its update, text responses from GPT-4 will be more accurate, and — in future — will come from both image and text inputs in a major leap forward for the technology.

For example, if a user sends a picture of the inside of a refrigerator, GPT-4 will not only correctly identify what is there, but also concoct what can be prepared with those ingredients.

OpenAI said it was working with a partner company, Be My Eyes, to prepare the next advance.

OpenAI is backed by Microsoft, which earlier this year said it would finance the research company with billions of dollars of financing.

The Windows-maker then swiftly integrated the tech into its Bing search engine, Edge browser and other products.

This sparked a race with Google which announced its own versions of the AI technology, with Amazon, Baidu and Meta also wading in to not be left behind.

OpenAI said that the new version was far less likely to go off the rails than its earlier chatbot with widely reported interactions with ChatGPT or Bing’s chatbot in which users were presented with lies, insults, or other so-called “hallucinations.”

“We spent six months making GPT-4 safer and more aligned. GPT-4 is 82 percent less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40 percent more likely to produce factual responses,” OpenAI said.

Founder Sam Altman admitted that despite the anticipation, GPT-4 “is still flawed, still limited, and it still seems more impressive on first use than it does after you spend more time with it.”