Let's check out the paper for actual tech details!
> Given both the competitive landscape and the safety implications of large-scale models like GPT-4, this report contains no further details about the architecture (including model size), hardware, training compute, dataset construction, training method, or similar.
At least they opened up the product. It's available for anyone paying $20 per month and soon via API. Historically, most products of that kind were just aimed at large B2B. They announced partnerships with Duolingo, JPMorgan and a few others but still keep their B2C product.
Not defending their actions, but it's not that common that new very valuable products are directly available for retail users to use.
This might be wild conspiracy, but what if OpenAI has discovered a way to make these LLMs a lot cheaper than they were? Transformer hype started with the invention of self-attention - perhaps, they have discovered something that beats it so hard, as GPTs beat Markov chains?
They cannot disclose anything, since it would make it apparent that GPT-4 cannot have a number of parameters that low, or the gradients would have faded out on the network that deep, and so on.
They don't want any competition, obviously, but with their recent write-up on "mitigating disinformation risks", where they propose to ban non-governmental consumers from having GPUs at all (as if regular Joe could just run 100'000 A100s in his garage), so perhaps this means the lowest border for inference and training is a lot lower than we have thought and assumed?
> Given both the competitive landscape and the safety implications of large-scale models like GPT-4, this report contains no further details about the architecture (including model size), hardware, training compute, dataset construction, training method, or similar.
- OpenAI