Distilling GPT-4 for Classification with an API

On November 6th, 2023, OpenAI unveiled a vision-enabled version of the GPT-4 API, known as gpt-4-vision-preview, which allows users to ask questions with images as context, enhancing image understanding and classification capabilities. The article discusses Autodistill GPT-4V, an open-source project that automates data labeling using GPT-4V, enabling users to train a smaller, fine-tuned model for specific tasks, such as classifying fish, using the labeled dataset. This approach allows models to be run on-device without internet dependency or incurring per-request API costs. The process involves installing Autodistill and configuring a caption ontology to define classification prompts, which are utilized to label images and train models like Ultralytics YOLOv8 Classification. Users can deploy these models locally using the Roboflow Inference Server. The article encourages experimenting with GPT-4V for various vision-related tasks, such as vehicle classification and damage detection, and sharing results to further evaluate its potential in solving business problems.