I know most people have been focused on Christmas, the follies involving the election of the next Speaker of the House, and other things this past month, but I wanted to update people here on something that may be truly revolutionary and have long lasting effects on the way we conduct business, our economy, and even our lives.
I am talking about artificial intelligence, or AI for short. This isn’t exactly new; in fact people have been championing and forebodingly warning about artificial intelligence sine at least the 1930’s, but it has been gaining some actual traction during the past decade, with some rudimentary use of AI programming in some applications. In 2015 the OpenAI corporation was founded by Sam Altman and Elon Musk to develop artificial intelligence applications for the betterment of society, though Elon Musk resigned from this non-profit corporation in 2018 and now has come out as a fierce critic of this organization recently, primarily due to Microsoft contributing a billion dollars to the company for further research. At any rate, OpenAI has been working on numerous AI projects, but the one which has garnered the most attention recently is ChatGPT, which is a program that can answer queries on nearly any topic you ask it and put out a detailed answer in easy to understand English (or Spanish, French, Japanese, Arabic, or whatever language a person may speak). Now there were prior versions which had been released which were crude in comparison, but on November 30, 2022 the OpenAI project released ChatGPT 3.0, which finally caught up to the average person’s actual speech patterns. Within five days a million people signed up to use the free program and tinker with it, and millions more have signed up to use it since then.
The way ChatGPT works is that there is a chat bar at the bottom the webpage where one can enter any question on their mind, such as “What is the capitol of the state of Missouri?” or “I have leftover rotisserie chicken, pasta, mayonnaise, and spinach in my refrigerator. What kind of dish can I make with this?” and the chatbot will come up with an answer, sometimes quite detailed and creative. Some people have even used it to come up with a detailed weight loss plan complete with detailed daily menus and exercise routines. I personally have tinkered with it recommending the best index funds to invest in with $1,000 and a mock hospital discharge summary for a patient with ulcerative colitis getting a colonoscopy, and it came up with a reasonably good answer in just seconds. I do have to say that at this time it is only indexed to answer information that has been programmed into it since 2021, so there will be no queries about the war in Ukraine it can answer. As with any new technology, there are people who will use it for questionable and/or nefarious purposes, as many high school and college students have used it write term papers on various subjects, much to the consternation of their teachers, one of who tweeted about how one of her students who was averaging C and D grades in her class, suddenly turned in a well written term paper which made her believe he was cheating but did not have any evidence to prove it. In fact, the New York City public school district has recently issued a ban on using ChatGPT in their schools. Other nefarious uses involved people asking how to create a Molotov cocktail or crack cocaine, and in another case a person asked about the vulnerabilities of bank credit cards and even asked for a list of such banks with vulnerable credit cards before the administrators caught on and banned such inquiries.
Now there’s some speculation on how this AI program is going to upend the economy and work as we know it, and my belief is that it will create a massive change in the way we work and learn. Having said that, the state of AI programming now is equivalent to where the internet was in 1995, with most people not even truly understanding its ramifications or even aware of the changes going on, and many of the announcements of the huge sweeping changes that AI is going to create are being pushed by charlatans who are or will be trying to make a quick buck based on their own limited understanding of this technology. But this is something I think people here should be made aware of, and you may even want to experiment with this AI program yourself by going to the OpenAI website.