Is ChatGPT, new kid on the AI block, a threat or a treat?

A new chatbot called ChatGPT created a sensation in the first week of December by recording one million users in just five days. To put that into perspective, Instagram took two and a half months to acquire one million users, while Facebook took ten months to achieve that number.

So, what is ChatGPT all about? This explainer will try to answer all your questions.

What is ChatGPT?

OpenAI, an artificial intelligence (AI) research and deployment company, released ChatGPT on November 30. It was founded in San Francisco in late 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and others, who together invested $1 billion in the venture.

Musk resigned from the board in February 2018. In 2019, Microsoft and Mathew Brown Companies (the firm that oversees the financial investments of Mathew Brown’s family) invested $1 billion.

ChatGPT is the latest in a series of AIs that OpenAI refers to as GPTs, an acronym that stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. An early version of this chatbot was fine-tuned through conversations with human trainers.

The chatbot writes poems, gives essay answers, and generates screenplays. Programmers are using it to write code or identify errors. OpenAI has equipped it with the ability to correct grammar, summarize difficult text into simpler concepts, convert movie titles into emojis, and even fix bugs in Python code.

Also read: ChatGPT: Dialogue-based chatbot enthralls all with its answers, solutions

It is a powerful language-generating system that generates answers superior to the ones we currently get from Google, the world’s most powerful search engine. It led to a contest by users giving it the most creative commands.

Some of the favourite prompts are:

“Explain General Relativity to me in the style of The Declaration of Independence”

“Describe artificial intelligence to me in the style of Victorian English”

“Can you explain nuclear fusion to me in the style of Stephen King?”

“Write a Biblical verse explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR”

The difference between Google and ChatGPT

Google works by searching through billions of web pages, indexing that content, and then ranking it in order of the most relevant or popular answers. It then gives a list of links for the user to click through.

ChatGPT offers something more enticing and useful for users looking for quick answers: a single answer based on its own search and synthesis of the information it has gone through. ChatGPT has been trained on millions of websites to extract relevant information and generate a clear and comprehensive answer.

Also read: Google working on AI app to create images through text

Is ChatGPT a threat to Google?

ChatGPT’s prime threat to Google in future seems to be the fact that it gives a single, immediate response that requires no further reading of other websites.

So, the question is, why doesn’t Google generate its own singular answers to questions like ChatGPT does?

The reason is that it would prevent people from scanning search results, which in turn would hurt Google’s transactional business model of getting people to click on ads. A little more than 81% of Alphabet Inc.’s $257.6 billion revenue in 2021 came from advertising, much of that being Google’s pay-per-click ads, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, who oversaw Google’s ads and commerce business between 2013 and 2018, says that generative search from systems like ChatGPT will disrupt Google’s traditional search business “in a massive way.”

OpenAI has not revealed its future plans for ChatGPT. But if its new chatbot starts sharing links to other websites, especially those that sell things, it could become a real threat to Google.

How accurate is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT does not reveal the sources of its information. One of its biggest weaknesses seems to be that sometimes, its answers are just wrong.

Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer site for coders, temporarily banned its users from sharing advice from ChatGPT because the thousands of answers programmers were posting from the system were often incorrect.

Also read: Just ‘Imagen’ it: Google AI tech will create HD video from your text prompt

What’s disconcerting about this defect is that the errors are hard to spot, especially when ChatGPT sounds so authoritative. The system’s answers “typically look like they might be good,” according to Stack Overflow. And by OpenAI’s own admission, they are often plausible sounding.

OpenAI had initially trained its system to be more cautious, but the result was that it declined questions it knew the answer to. By going the other way, the result is something like students lying their way through an answer after not studying.

OpenAI warns that “ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.”

How will ChatGPT affect jobs?

As it is with every advancement in artificial intelligence and machine learning, the internet is seemingly concerned about an eventual robot takeover, and how everyone’s jobs will be affected.

ChatGPT was questioned by BBC, and had the following to say about how it would affect humans’ occupations.

Did it think AI would take the jobs of human writers? No. It argued that “AI systems like myself can help writers by providing suggestions and ideas, but ultimately it is up to the human writer to create the final product.”

Also read: Elon Musk’s robot Optimus can water plants, lift boxes, and even dance

Asked about the social impact of AI systems such as itself, it said that was “hard to predict.”

Had it been trained on Twitter data? It said it did not know.

It seems early days yet to speculate on the full impact of ChatGPT and similar AI systems on jobs. AI will probably not make human workers obsolete, at least not for a long time.

In fact, 90% of leading businesses already have ongoing investments in AI technologies, and more than half of them report experiencing greater productivity.

Artificial intelligence will create more jobs, especially in the fields of medical science, automobiles and transportation, cyber security, e-commerce, and many other sectors.

(With agency inputs)