Chatbot causes panic

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: CAN WRITE AN ESSAY, SPEAKS LIKE A HUMAN Don’t get carried away, say tech experts as machine comes on the market.

Excitement around ChatGPT – an easy to use AI chatbot that can write an essay or computer code upon request within seconds – has sent schools into panic and turned Big Tech green with envy.

The potential impact of ChatGPT on society remains complicated and unclear even as its creator on Wednesday announced a paid subscription version in the United States.

Here is a closer look at what ChatGPT is (and is not):

It is possible that November’s release of ChatGPT by California company OpenAI will be a turning point in introducing artificial intelligence to the wider public.

What is less clear is whether ChatGPT is actually a breakthrough.

Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta and professor at New York University, believes “ChatGPT is not a particularly interesting scientific advance,” calling the app a “flashy demo” built by talented engineers.

LeCun, speaking to the Big Technology Podcast, said ChatGPT is merely churning “one word after another” based on inputs and patterns found on the internet.

“When working with these AI models, you have to remember that they’re slot machines, not calculators,” warned Haomiao Huang of Kleiner Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm.

“Every time you ask a question and pull the arm, you get an answer that could be marvellous... or not,” Huang wrote in Ars Technica, the tech news website.

ChatGPT is powered by an AI language model that is nearly three years old – OpenAI’s GPT-3.

The true revolution is the humanlike chat, said Jason Davis, research professor at Syracuse University.

“It’s familiar, it’s conversational. It’s kind of like putting in a Google search request,” he said.

ChatGPT’s success even shocked its creators at OpenAI, which got billions in new financing from Microsoft in January.

“We put GPT-3 out almost three years ago... so the update from that to ChatGPT should have been predictable and I want to do more introspection on why I was sort of miscalibrated on that,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview to StrictlyVC, a newsletter. –