gpt-4-released-march-2023-multimodal

IN premise — entries/2026/06/21/wiki-Generative_pre-trained_transformer-chunk-1.md

Created 2026-06-21T09:50:09+00:00

GPT-4 was released March 14, 2023, with multimodal capabilities (text + image input, text output only).

Summary

As of mid-March 2023, the frontier model could understand both text and images but was limited to producing text only, meaning it could describe a photo but never generate one. This pins down a hard capability boundary for that point in the timeline, so any downstream reasoning about what was possible in mid-2023 has to respect that image generation was out of reach.

Dependents

These beliefs depend on this one:

IN gpt-series-demonstrated-exponential-capability-emergence — The GPT series demonstrated exponential capability emergence across four generations: basic language modeling (GPT-1, 117M params, 2018) → zero-shot multitask (GPT-2, 1.5B, 2019) → few-shot in-context learning (GPT-3, 175B, 2020) → multimodal reasoning (GPT-4, 2023).