As of a few days ago, the extent of my interaction with artifical intelligence was telling Siri to set a timer for 7 minutes when I’m boiling eggs (that’s the exact amount of time for boiling eggs, and then immediately dunk them in ice water). Then ChatGPT was released. It totally blew my mind.
What is it?
For those that haven’t tried ChatGPT, it’s essentially a smarter Google - you prompt it for some information or task and it does it. It does it stunningly well in most cases. Take for example this basic prompt:
It checks out!
Besides just giving random facts, ChatGPT is capable of creative writing as well. Take for example this nice rhyming poem:
Here is a prompt for another poem in the style of my favorite poet Edgar Allen Poe. It did a decent job.
However, it did not keep it short. Here is a cool feature of ChatGPT - it knows the context.
It keeps the context.
It can event write code!
🤯 indeed. Not only did it do precisely what I asked, but it also added instructions on how to make it executable and even comments.
So what?
I was not interested in artifical intelligence before because I couldn’t find an easy way to use it. ChatGPT has sparked my curiousity and has me thinking alot about how AI will impact society. This technology will very quickly obselete jobs and maybe make entire industries irrelevant. This kind of AI is a direct threat for most office jobs. Companies no longer need to pay people to write, review or create. I can’t even imagine how different society will be when AI like ChatGPT is used broadly.
Limitations
It’s wrong!
There’s been some reports that ChatGPT fails to give the right answer and it is confidently wrong. For example, when prompted for What is the fastest mammal? it responds confidently with Sailfish. StackOverflow also banned answers from ChatGPT for questions on their forum, citing that the answers are misleading and sometimes wrong. I think the accuracy can be improved with further training data and broader interactions with users.
It has morals!
ChatGPT won’t help you commit crime. It also gives advice when warranted for risque prompts.
No internet
OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT has not plugged the AI into the internet so you cannot yet search for who won the World Cup (Argentina of course..).
Future
I am already seeing that this kind of technology will be an essential tool for my day to day activities and I am excited to see it develop further. However I should stay mindful to not outsource all of my critical thinking to this robot, just the boring parts. Whatever the future may look like, the skill of prompting AI will be immensely useful. With good prompts, you can call upon the power of the combined knowledge of humanity to solve your problems.
ChatGPT is currently free and open to the public. They haven’t yet announced pricing. Give it a shot if you’re interested: https://chat.openai.com/chat