(Source: CNN, Fareed's Global Briefing)
“Every so often a technology captures the world’s imagination,” The Economist writes. “The latest example, judging by the chatter in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, in corner offices, newsrooms and classrooms around the world, is” OpenAI’s now-famous chatbot ChatGPT.
Undoubtedly. From rendering a King James-style guide to removing a peanut-butter sandwich from a VCR (as one Twitter user asked it to) to planning workouts (as the MIT Technology Review’s Rhiannon Williams had it do), ChatGPT has been met with popular fascination. Its results aren’t perfect, by any means: Those workout recommendations are sometimes nonsensical, Williams writes, and in December The New Statesman’s Ido Vock found that if you ask ChatGPT to be racist, it will oblige, depending on how you ask.
With Microsoft investing $10 billion in OpenAI last month, The Economist writes, a competition is on, with Microsoft’s current and future AI technology figuring to compete with Google’s as new applications are imagined (including enhanced web searching). The tech sector's giants may have an advantage, but the landscape is varied: “The capital flowing into generative-ai startups … suggests that venture capitalists are betting that not all the value will be captured by big tech,” The Economist writes, adding that China’s party-state can be expected to make its own R&D bets. “The ai race is only just getting started.”
At The New Yorker, writer and programmer James Somers suggests another hint as to how the next generation of AI will emerge. Somers marvels at the proficiency of Whisper, an AI-driven voice-recognition application, compared with error-prone software Somers has used in the past to transcribe interviews. (When using older applications, it could feel as if one spent more time correcting a program’s errors than one would have spent transcribing, Somers muses; Whisper, by contrast, smoothly picks up on context and technical jargon.)
The important thing about Whisper, to Somers? It was developed by a programmer from an OpenAI platform that the company had made public. “Eventually,” Somers writes, “someone will release a program that’s nearly as capable as ChatGPT, and entirely open-source. An enterprising amateur will find a way to make it run for free on your laptop. People will start downloading it, remixing it, connecting it, rethinking and reimagining. The capabilities of A.I. will collide with our collective intelligence. And the world will start changing in ways we can’t yet predict.”
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