ChatGPT: An Ongoing Research Project
On the internet nothing is for free, but everybody knows that, right?
To all new readers, I want to say hello and thank you for subscribing to my newsletter. A lot is happening in the world of conversational AI — and I’d like to make sense of it all, for you (as much as I can).
Is it worth the buzz?
On 30 november, OpenAI launched ChatGPT free for anybody to use. Currently, it has over 1M users and the hype is real. The internet is flooding with crazy, amazing, silly, funny examples of its language capabilities, including suggesting code, bug-fixing, role-playing, summarizing or rewriting content, brain storming, and more. It is, without a doubt, the best chatbot ever built.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, made it explicit that ChatGPT is not a product. It’s very much a ‘research release’. He went on to predict that, until neural interfaces become a thing, languages interface are probably going to be the next best thing.
Rushing to conclusions
There is a hot debate going on online is about what ChatGPT is and is not — and everyone is drawing their own conclusions.
We can divide public opinion in two camps, basically:
ChatGPT is remarkable, yet offers no real world utility. It has a wealth of knowledge, but no intelligence behind it. Although it’s great at having conversations, there is no way to integrate it with existing conversational AI solutions, rendering it useless.
ChatGPT is the holy grail of conversational AI. This is what the future looks like and it is the closest thing to AGI we’ve seen so far. It can do an unimaginable number of language- and coding-related tasks in real-time, making it basically smarter than any single one individual on planet Earth.
The interesting thing about these two camps is that they are not wrong. They are both right.
The key to finding the answer is asking the right questions
In some regards, ChatGPT is useless. It can’t book appointments or check your bill. It can’t help your customers, or find you a restaurant nearby, check the nearest bike shop or cancel your latest Amazon order. It can’t do anything, really.
That’s not what it was made for, though. Referring back to OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman’s initial tweet, ChatGPT is ongoing research and opening it up to the public is part of that research.
Not only that, people also seem to forget that having 1M users engage with a piece of technology is probably going to provide a vast amount of valuable data that will help them improve on what’s currently there. On Twitter, people are actively contributing ideas on how to further expand the capabilities of ChatGPT. If anything, the public is providing OpenAI with free roadmap.
The real question to ask yourself is: what would generation x of this technology look like? What would be the implications? What fields of business would it disrupt and how? What are the societal impacts?
There's no such thing as a free lunch on the internet
One last thing that isn’t being talked about much, overshadowed by the hype probably, is that ChatGPT is not some sort of charity project. Yes, part of OpenAI’s mission statement is democratizing AI, but OpenAI is also a for-profit organization with Microsoft as its biggest investor.
Just sayin’, on the internet nothing is for free. But everybody knows that, right?
PS. All headlines in this article were written by ChatGPT.
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