OpenAI recently game out with a new artifical intelligence chatbot called ChatGPT. I have seen it in mainstream news but I don’t know if people outside the tech industry are paying much attention to it. I believe that these AIs have amazing capability and have already far exceeded human intelligence. People can find holes in them, but it seems like that will get harder over time.
ChatGPT is not only capable of writing essays for you, but it can even write code better than many software engineers. It has some sort of understanding of the underlying code, where it not only generates code, but can tell you why it wrote it in a specific way. I had a coworker ask it to write some code to parse a string in a certain format. It replied instantly with an acceptable solution. Then he asked it to rewrite it to minimize string allocations and it switched the string APIs it was using. It explained that it would be harder to read if written this way. Truly remarkable.
If only I was younger, I could have saved many days of my life by having it do my homework! It could have helped a lot with writing essays. I can see how it will trivialize a lot of things. As sad as it may be, tudors may already be obsolete, but maybe it will open new doors we haven’t thought of. There are so many other places where this technology could be used that I can’t even imagine them all yet.
One use that probably gets a lot of thought is customer service. If the bot could be integrated with a company’s IT systems effectively, it could take care of that interaction. That’s an obvious one for business owners to see.
Another topic of discussion is whether this can replace the search engine. I feel like we’ve already been using similar AI models for voice based search on mobile or home devices, but to run this model for a general search is probably not cost effective to scale in the current state. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the future. Unfortunately, it seems like these models are too large to fit on a device that someone can own, so for now I’d imagine users will have to rely on a shared service.