OpenAI on Monday unveiled GPT-4 Turbo, an improved version of its flagship text-generating AI model, GPT-4, at its first-ever developer conference in San Francisco, the U.S. state of California.

"We released the first version of GPT-4 in March and made GPT-4 generally available to all developers in July. Today we're launching a preview of the next generation of this model, GPT-4 Turbo," the company said. The new model is much cheaper and processes much more data than its predecessor. 

It unveiled assistant application programming interfaces (APIs) with vision and image modalities. It also launched a beta program for developers to fine-tune GPT-4 models. GPT-4 Turbo comes in two versions, a strictly text-analyzing one and a version that understands the context of both text and images, both generally available "in the coming weeks," according to OpenAI.

GPT-4 was trained on web data up to September 2021, but GPT-4 Turbo's knowledge cut-off is April 2023. It has a 128k context window so it can fit the equivalent of more than 300 pages of text in a single prompt, the company said.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared the updates at the conference, which attracted 900 developers from around the world and marked the company's latest attempt to capitalize on the popularity of ChatGPT by offering incentives to build in its ecosystem.

ChatGPT, launched in November 2022, now has 100 million weekly active users, Altman said.

OpenAI is calling the customized AI apps "GPTs," which the company said are early versions of AI assistants that perform real-world tasks, such as booking flights, on behalf of a user.

It will launch a GPT Store later this month where people can share their GPTs and earn money based on the number of users. It's a renewed effort from the company's failed attempts to build an ecosystem of ChatGPT plugins earlier this year.

"Eventually, you'll just ask the computer for what you need, and it'll do all of these tasks for you," Altman said in his keynote speech at the event in San Francisco. 

"We really believe that gradual iterative deployment is the best way to address the safety challenges of AI. We think it's especially important to move carefully towards this future."

Speaking to the media on Monday, Altman warned startups using OpenAI's technology against building applications that only have simple integrations with OpenAI.

"We are planning to build the obvious features," he said. "But there's enormous value to building a deeper integration on top of OpenAI."

Altman said he envisions a future where each person has multiple GPTs that can work together to accomplish tasks on their behalf.

OpenAI wants more enterprises and developers to build models to rival those developed by Anthropic and Alphabet's Google, and open source models such as Meta Platforms' Llama. It also competes for enterprise customers with Microsoft.

(With input from agencies)