“The first AI language bot for public use is making waves by successfully mimicking human beings — but despite the fears, says Rohan Silva (founder of Second Home), it may prove a positive tool.
While it’s obviously not perfect, you can understand why ChatGPT is sparking so much debate. You can ask it to write a sonnet about Sadiq Khan (“So let us honour London’s noble son, who works to make his city, shining, one…”) or a one-line summary of Prince Harry’s new book (“A personal and raw account of his mental health struggles…”)
There have even been news reports that ChatGPT-generated answers would have passed the entrance test for the prestigious Wharton MBA course in the US. It’s a level of sophistication that has many worried but others excited — including Microsoft who on Tuesday announced a multi-billion-dollar investment deal with OpenAI, the company which created ChatGPT, to try to get ahead of its competitors in the artificial intelligence arms race. OpenAI, which counts Elon Musk among its early investors, is now valued at nearly $30 billion — quite an achievement for a company with only 350 employees.
ChatGPT uses a “deep learning model”, basically crunching through vast quantities of text on the internet and using that data to figure out how to construct human-sounding sentences.
Meta’s chief AI scientist has claimed that ChatGPT is “not particularly innovative”, because its underlying technology is not that different from what’s being developed at other companies.
Whether that’s true or not, there’s no denying that ChatGPT is one of the most tangible uses so far of artificial intelligence — the term for software capable of doing tasks that previously only humans could do (such as writing complex prose), and potentially outsmarting us too (like at chess, where no human can beat the latest AI machines).”