Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have been consistently influencing the progress of education for an extended period, with its impact becoming more significant especially after the launch of ChatGPT-3.5 at the end of November 2022. In the field of physics education, recent research regarding the performance of ChatGPT-3.5 in solving physics problems discovered that its problem-solving abilities were only at the level of novice students, insufficient to cause outstanding alarm in the field of physics education. However, the release of ChatGPT-4 presented substantial improvements in reasoning and conciseness. How does this translate to performance in solving physics problems, and what kind of impact might it have on education? This study undertakes a comprehensive assessment of ChatGPT-4's performance in solving physics problems from the perspective of physics conceptual understanding and reasoning, and compares its performance with that of students. It is concluded that ChatGPT-4's performance in solving physics problems has significantly improved compared to ChatGPT-3.5, and was notably superior to the majority of middle school and high school students. This finding presents both a challenge and an opportunity for physics education and the broader educational field, and triggers immediate considerations for coping with this challenge in future teaching and assessment environments.