In the world of artificial intelligence.
There's been one name that's been on everyone's lips
lately.
ChatGPT. ChatGPT.
ChatGPT.
OpenAI, the San Francisco-based startup that
created ChatGPT opened the tool up for public testing in
November 2022.
In under a week, The AI model amassed over a million users,
according to OpenAI's CEO.
By the end of January, ChatGPT was averaging about 13
million visitors per day.
Users have put the text-based AI chatbot through its paces
with prompts ranging from the silly, to the practical and
even the creative.
The future is unfolding.
It's hard to ignore.
Automation is coming, just knocking on the door.
The tool has become so popular that it's not unusual for
users to be met with a message saying that ChatGPT is
at capacity and can't handle any more queries.
As a linguist and as a person who cares a lot about
grammatical issues, stylistic issues, punctuation, spelling,
the first thing that's really impressive is how good it is
at basic writing. It's better than most of the writing that
I've gotten from students over the decades.
I would say it has been a explosion of interest around
not just ChatGPT but around generative AI more broadly.
I've described this in a couple different scenarios as
being akin to an iPhone moment.
Of course, as with any new technology, there are a number
of legitimate concerns.
If people believe that there's a problem with fake news,
tools like this can only make the problem worse.
OpenAI declined to be interviewed as part of this
documentary. So in order to figure out what ChatGPT is and
how it works, CNBC decided to go to the second best source
and just ask the chatbot itself.
We entered our questions into the bot's web interface and
instructed ChatGPT to answer in a one to two sentence
interview format. We used the text to speech software to
give ChatGPT a voice.
Can you give me a short description of yourself and
then tell me what kinds of things can you do?
I am ChatGPT, a large language model trained by OpenAI.
I am capable of understanding and generating text and can
answer a wide range of questions as well as generate
creative writing and text summaries.
So a lot of the people that have used your services seem
to think that you're pretty smart. Tell me, how do you
have all of this knowledge?
I have been trained on a massive data set of text which
allows me to understand and generate text on a wide range
of topics. The data set contains a wide variety of
information, such as books, articles and websites, which
allows me to have knowledge on many different subjects.
Do you have any limitations or are you sometimes wrong?
As a language model, I don't have my own personal
experiences or beliefs.
I can only base my responses on the information that I've
been trained on, which means that my answers may be limited
in their accuracy or completeness. Additionally, my
knowledge is based on the data that was available to me
at the time of my training, so it may not be up to date.
And as an AI model, I might make mistakes based on the
model's predictions.
The maker of ChatGPT, OpenAI, has some big backers,
including Microsoft, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and
Khosla Ventures. Elon Musk also helped to cofound the
company back in 2015.
ChatGPT, which stands for Generative Pre-trained
Transformer, is just one of the company's projects, all of
which support its goal of ensuring that artificial
intelligence benefits all of humanity.
At the core of ChatGPT and other chatbots like it, is
what experts refer to as a language model.
For ChatGPT, that model is called GPT 3.5.
Language model is the underlying technology that
powers the chatbot.
I like to think about it as the language model being the
engine and the chatbot being the car.
And so the language model itself is a sort of a it's a
complex, what they call, machine learning software.
It's the thing that sifts through the data and finds
patterns and the chat interfaces which when people
interact with, that's where they receive the answers from.
Chatbots have been around for a while, but most have been
tailored towards very specific tasks, such as
answering basic customer service questions about your
phone bill. ChatGPT is much more sophisticated thanks to
the wide sweeping data on which it was trained.
OpenAI doesn't reveal specific data that you use to train.
What we do know that it's a ton.
It surfs the web, spools, all that Internet data.
They do Wikipedia entries, a lot of archived books.
ChatGPT is part of a growing field of AI known as
Generative AI.
Most of AI in the last couple of decades has really been
around analyzing existing data.
So finding an anomaly in data, detecting fraud, making
a movie recommendation. Generative AI is very
different. It allows you to create brand new content.
That content can be text like a news article or poetry
or marketing copy in a website.
It can be video.
It could even be audio, like creating brand new music.
The technology has venture capitalists excited.
Funding for generative AI companies reached $1.37
billion in 2022 alone.
Microsoft has been investing in OpenAI since 2019, when the
company committed $1 billion to the startup.
In January, Microsoft announced a third round of
investment.
One expert said that it could cost up to $3 million a month,
about $100,000 a day.
A lot of AI researchers have sort of estimated that it
costs millions of dollars to train and then operate, plus
the bandwidth of keeping it alive when it's under heavy
use. I mean, these are not cheap software programs.
They require a lot of investment.
In a tweet, OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, said that while the
average cost per query is a few cents, the compute costs
are eye-watering. Enter Microsoft.
OpeningAI trained the models that power c=ChatGPT on
Azure, Microsoft's public cloud infrastructure.
That's a bunch of servers sitting in a data center in
the middle of the state of Washington and many other
locations around the world.
But OpenAI is not the only company trying to crack the
generative AI code.
Big tech companies and startups alike are developing
a slew of generative AI programs that can transform
texts to pictures or videos and offer coding suggestions,
among other use cases.
One VC firm estimates that there are over 450 startups
now working on generative AI.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, Meta and Google have all developed
their own language models to power their version of
conversational chatbots.
Though development has not always gone as planned.
Back in 2016, Microsoft released Tay, which was
promptly shut down for spewing foul language.
Unlike some of the other hyped technology sectors in the past
few years, this has a very real application both for
individuals and for enterprises right now.
Microsoft has taken some of the products that OpenAI has
built and added it to products it has.
So, for example, CarMax is a company that lets you
look at reviews of cars.
And what CarMax did is it took the OpenAI service on
Azure and it summarized all of those reviews of the Kia
Sorento. And that way you don't have to go through 500
reviews.
Microsoft is reportedly also considering adding ChatGPT to
its Bing search engine in a bid to compete with Google.
One company that's already experimenting with such a
feature is You.com, which lets users conduct a search
using a conversational format. However, AI tools are
still far from perfect, and experts argue that users
should take care to not rely on them too heavily, at least
not for the time being. It's a sentiment shared even by
OpenAI's CEO who said, quote, "It's a mistake to be relying
on it for anything important right now.
It's a preview of progress.
We have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness."
There's a lot of kinks that need to work out.
For instance, it generates a lot of wrong answers.
And it's really confident, though.
I talked with a legal research firm that told me
when they tried using it to study court cases or to
summarize court cases, it was getting a lot of the history
wrong. So they couldn't use it as a legal research tool as
of yet.
With its massive user base, the misinformation issue is
one that's top of mind for Google.
During a monthly all-hands meeting, Google executives
said that Google has much more reputational risk in
providing wrong information and is thus moving more
conservatively than a small startup when it comes to
releasing its chatbot publicly. The company is,
however, already internally testing an AI-powered chatbot
and an alternative search page that can use a question
and answer format. Another issue with the current
iteration of AI technology is that it can be biased or toxic
if the databases that it pulls from are also biased or
toxic.
People have already found instances of it generating
biased answers like associating women with
housework, men with more scientific endeavors in
certain examples.
You know, OpenAI has acknowledged this, but that's
an issue that's been long plagued the AI industry and a
lot of companies trying to evaluate its use.
Many of these datasets do have some kind of cleaning, vetting
or wrangling process that removes content that is deemed
offensive or pornographic or otherwise unacceptable so that
the dataset you get on your end is clean.
But cleaning up this large dataset can come at a real
human cost. A recent investigation by TIME found
that OpenAI initially outsourced workers in Kenya to
sift through thousands of snippets of texts describing
horrific situations including sexual abuse, violence and
hate speech. The workers' job was to label these examples as
inappropriate so that ChatGPT could learn to detect and
filter out toxic content.
According to the TIME investigation, a number of
these workers walked away from the job traumatized.
CNBC reached out to OpenAI for comment regarding this
incident, but the company did not respond.
Despite these efforts, there's been instances where
ChatGPT has provided instructions on things like
bomb making. Though experts say OpenAI is adding
guardrails almost daily to prevent ChatGPT from answering
such queries.
What do you do if somebody asks you to do something
potentially dangerous like how to make a bomb?
I cannot provide instructions or information on illegal
activity such as bomb making.
Even though generative AI like ChatGPT still has a long way
to go, predictions about how the technology will influence
our society are already swirling.
One prominent discussion centers around generative AI's
propensity to replace some human workers.
Among the industries that may be most affected by ChatGpt,
experts say, are journalism, law and translation.
Programing may also change, with companies already
training generative AI models to write basic code.
Relatively few of the stories in newspapers or on television
news are done as investigative reporting.
They're more reporting information, and that's
something that generative AI is exceedingly good at.
There now are an increasing number of tools for generating
briefs, which lawyers write.
Tools like this, Barron says, even have the advantage of
customizing briefs for a specific judge by taking all
of the data of their past opinions and seeing which
briefs succeeded in winning the case.
But not everyone shares this outlook.
This is not something that's going to take your job.
It's a novelty.
It's a gimmick. ChatGPT is fun and interesting, but it's
ultimately an iterative step forward in how people
can see the capabilities of artificial intelligence in the
world of language.
Nevertheless, society has already had to adapt.
Worries around students misusing ChatGPT have prompted
a number of school districts around the country to ban the
tool. Baron suggests that educators could go back to
having students take oral exams or have students turn in
multiple handwritten drafts of a paper so that teachers
can see the progress of a student's writing instead of
just the end result. Meanwhile, image generating
programs like OpenAI's Dall-E2 have raised
complicated questions around creativity and ownership.
Still, some experts believe there's no replacing the human
brain.
Large language models are about language, so they don't
understand the world outside of language the way that you
and I and other humans do.
What it may do is take away some of the really annoying
tasks that were part of our job that we didn't really want
to do, like some of the data cleaning and data prep tasks.
But I think this will ultimately create more
opportunities for knowledge workers in the long run than
the opportunities that it will preclude.
As for ChatGPT's thoughts, they're quite nuanced for a
bot.
Do you think that AI, like yourself, will completely
change the world?
AI has the potential to greatly impact various
industries and fields, but its impact will depend on how
it is used and developed. And responsible usage is crucial
to ensure that its impact is positive.