Introducing ChatGPT, OpenAI's Latest Masterpiece

For those who like watching sci-fi movies, I’m sure you’ve heard of artificial intelligence (AI). In theatres, AI gets depicted as creepy robots taking over the world. And in reality, these AI are indeed getting quite intelligent.

Recently, the AI chatbot created by OpenAI received a lot of popularity over its almost unbelievable capabilities. OpenAI is a research laboratory specializing in the research of artificial intelligence and got founded by some familiar names, like Elon Musk and its current CEO Samuel Altman. This laboratory recently launched its improved AI “chatbot” of sorts, known as ChatGPT. The name stands for “Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer,” and is taking the internet by storm. In just five days after launching, users reached 1 million, faster than social media platforms like Instagram. It uses deep-learning algorithms to generate human-like responses. ChatGPT got so overwhelmed at one point that it temporarily shut down. So what caused such demand for this new AI chat?

Let’s take a step back to look at the uniqueness of humans. We are known to have curious minds, emotions, humour, and much more. It has been a long-time goal for scientists to create a robot mind that mimics our consciousness. And a well-known judge of how well AI does its job is the Turing Test (originally the imitation game), developed by Alan Turing in 1950. Turing proposed a human judge conversation between a human and an AI (with its purpose of making human-like responses). Some of the participants were machines, and the judge would know this. The conversation would be limited to texting. If the judge could not reliably tell the human participants from the AI, the machine passed the test.

It’s a complicated and once thought unachievable goal in Turing’s time. But today, many machines can pass the test. They’re not only able to chat with basic algorithms and strategies, but AI like ChatGPT can also give you well-organized, sophisticated answers. All you have to do is enter a prompt, either in the form of requesting information or as a question, as well as enter certain circumstances. That could be very helpful in cases like when you want to buy a product, though not sure which one to buy, because it can process info from all over the internet, including previous reviews, comparisons, etc., to give you the best options list. It’s much easier than searching it yourself, scrolling through pages of internet results, and ultimately wasting time and effort.

This processing-info-skill is also its flaw, though. It can’t always be reliable since sometimes, putting vast amounts of information together makes an inappropriate or misleading response. Additionally, the tech is not yet that advanced, making it unable to perform tasks like understanding complex concepts, as they require a high level of intelligence. An example of the flaws of ChatGPT is that coders who prompted it to write a code more often ended up with typos than correct code.

The way different people use ChatGPT varies a lot. For some, it’s useful as an assistant to multiple tasks, like quick-searching, generating content quickly, translating and rephrasing sentences. Others use it to earn money (like using AI to write customer responses). However, it’s not all pros and benefits because it poses substantial threats to industries and other companies.

Fields that could be affected by this AI are industries like journalism, as new AI technology could (with the latest information) provide more targeted and accurate news. There is also the fact of AI out-competing humans in fields like data analysis, which we would soon find ourselves overpowered by the computing power of AI like ChatGPT. And then there are the companies that could face some serious competition.

One such tech giant is Google. The company earns a large chunk of profit from its search engine. However, ChatGPT and other AI could rival that, giving more helpful and quicker answers than Google’s search engines ever could be. Of course, Google’s vast internet empire wouldn’t necessarily crumble in a day, though it would certainly be damaged. Other previously dominant search engines, like Microsoft’s Bing, could also face the same problem as Google.

Luckily, the emergence of ChatGPT and other AI doesn’t mean saying goodbye to Google and other tech giants because there are ways that these companies could face new competition. And the most efficient of them is to develop their rival artificial intelligence, which is what Microsoft has done, though we have yet to see Google doing the same. It is a well-established example of market competition. New products or services introduced into an industry usually drives other industry members to do the same, changing the entire landscape of that field and sometimes starting new eras.

And with ChatGPT, there is one last question many may be asking: Could AI pose a risk to humanity or take over? Even though it is still a long time away, the fast development of super-strong artificial intelligence and robots capable of doing complex tasks (like Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robot, Atlas) suggest a threat posed by AI. In the future, AI could potentially access dangerous things like biochemical weapons systems and nuclear arsenals, and deep-learning algorithms let the AI evade constraints programmers set for it. That would be the same as the artificial intelligence in movies, like Ultron from the Avengers franchise, made by Marvel Studios, though I hope we never get to live in such a world.

Two decades ago, scientists wouldn’t have even dreamed of the above possibilities, but in today’s world, we’re getting closer every day. Elon Musk responded to the launching of ChatGPT as “scary good” on Twitter. Some believe that we should push the “stop” button while we still can and eliminate the threat of AI. Meanwhile, others think we can use artificial intelligence to our advantage, replacing many previous tasks so humans can focus on more important ones. In the end, it’s the case of a double-edged sword, and it all comes down to how we use it.

So what’s your opinion about this new leap in AI technology? Do the dangers outweigh the benefits of such machines? Well, you could ask ChatGPT about that. Thank you for reading this week’s article from the New News Newsminute, which was thankfully not written by a robot. Please tune in next time for more news updates and analysis.