A Google-Less World? Introducing ChatGPT.
Imagine a world where people don’t search for things by using Google. Sounds crazy right. Except not so anymore. Lauded by Economist Larry Summers as possibly the most important advancement for mankind since the wheel or fire, ChatGPT brings humanity ever closer to passing the Turing Test (famed mathematician Alan Turing’s test to see if computers can mimic human beings without a discernible difference).
ChatGPT is a language model/artificial intelligence software developed by OpenAI. The software has been trained on billions of texts generated by us humans in the internet, such as from articles and books in a variety of language, and can intelligently synthesize information to learn the patterns and structures of human language. When you ask ChatGPT to search for something, it gives you much more comprehensive and detail answers than Google, which simply returns links (on another note, Google has developed its own AI, Google LaMDA.
Once trained, it’s usable for various natural language processing tasks, such as language translation, summarization, and text generation. ChatGPT can be further fine-tuned and refined to improve its performance on those tasks. As more and more information gets populated in the internet, ChatGPT only gets smarter and smarter.
The software can be used for many specialized tasks, even writing an entire essay for you. However, this brings some risk too: OpenAI states, “The response may not always be accurate or appropriate, as the model is not able to browse the web or access new information beyond what it was trained on. However, it can still provide useful and interesting responses in many cases.” Furthermore, if computers can mimic humans, imagine how difficult it would be to tell if it’s Alexa telling you something or a real-life person. The risk for spreading wrong information increases dramatically.
Regardless, this is a huge achievement for computers, robots, technology, and mankind.