Klinton Bicknell, head of AI at the language learning app Duolingo, was given rare access to GPT-4, a new artificial intelligence model created by Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Within six months, Bicknell’s team had used GPT-4 to create a sophisticated chatbot of their own that human users could talk with, in order to practice conversational French, Spanish and English as if they were in real-world settings. GPT-4 was found to have detailed and specialised knowledge of how languages work and of the correspondences between different languages.
