Has anything had quite the meteoric impact of artificial intelligence application ChatGPT? Every major publication on the planet has devoted space to the release and potential applications of the software chatbot developed by OpenAI, a company initially funded with seed money from Elon Musk and others.
Although OpenAI released an art application earlier in 2022, it was the late-year release of ChatGPT, a predictive text application “trained” on a very large data set, that set the technology sector aflutter. Musk himself tweeted in December: “ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI.”
Released with very little fanfare, ChatGPT reached a million sign-ups in a handful of days, and its adoption rate shows no signs of slowing. In fact, as covered in my recent columns (see links below), many are only now discovering that artificial intelligence applications are fast becoming a fact of life.
A report as this article was being written suggests that ChatGPT has in fact reached 100,000,000 unique users just a few months after launch. No previous application in the internet age has seen such an uptake.
Recently, the creator of Gmail predicted that ChatGPT and related services may forespell the end of Google’s search business within a couple of years. That seems unthinkable at present but I do know people who’ve switched their regular use of search to the AI application. They like the “one-answer” approach instead of the optimized and ranked list of hundreds of answers to a question posed in Google Search.
Despite its rapid adoption rate, there is no shortage of naysayers and critics. And that’s completely aside from those who think this sort of technology has trappings of end times. They can point to errors made by ChatGPT, to subjects that are completely missing, and to a blandness in responses. Then of course there is the minefield of ethical implications arising from use of AI technologies in everything from media to academic publications.
In my own case I learned quickly that ChatGPT is not capable of solving physics problems. It may go through the motions of solving a problem with an authoritative tone, but it gets the answer wrong. I asked it to calculate the orbital period of a certain satellite that interests me, which circles the earth at an altitude of 6,000 km. This is a typical Physics 12 problem here in B.C. Ten times I asked ChatGPT to give me an answer. It dutifully did so each time, using varied approaches, nicely including the steps, or working, much like a teacher would want from a student. Each time the answer was different, and each time it was incorrect.
This should not be a surprise. After all, the name ChatGPT stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer. This chatbot has been trained to digest enormous amounts of text, and it is not necessarily capable of mathematics and physics. That will no doubt come soon, but for now this is a limitation.
Nor is ChatGPT versed in current affairs. Again, that’s a known limitation. ChatGPT operates on a large data set frozen in 2021. ChatGPT does not perform live internet lookups for current data. In that regard it is not a search engine as the term is currently understood by most.
ChatGPT may give the impression it is able to do live lookups. I asked it to analyze a column I’d recently written by giving it a link. It generated a response alright that at a glance looked plausible. However the problem is that it was completely fabricated, nonsense if you will. Much of what it wrote was simply not mentioned in the column at all.
Therein lies a problem with ChatGPT at the moment. It doesn’t cite its sources. However, that’s changing and there are indications that we will see this shortly. It’s not clear if that will only be in a paid version of the chatbot (current talk is of around $40 a month!), or in versions that Microsoft plans to roll out as integration into its software lineup gets underway.
As this column was being written, an enhanced version of ChatGPT was being integrated into Bing, the Microsoft search engine that until now has been mostly ignored. Microsoft’s CEO has publicly stated he expects all of the company’s products to have ChatGPT integration in the near future. Need to reply to an email in Outlook? ChatGPT will take care of drafting a response. Need 12 slides for a PowerPoint presentation? ChatGPT will do all the initial legwork for you.
Search company Alphabet/Google clearly sees ChatGPT as a threat to its business, and has brought back founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to deal with aspects of the implications from this and other emergent artificial intelligence companies. To adapt from an advertising slogan of the past, 100,000,000 users can’t be wrong. Bard, a ChatGPT-like application was hastily rolled out, but the stock market was unimpressed when Reuters news agency spotted an error in Google’s promotional advertisement for the service.
It’s too early to say whether ChatGPT and its associated business DALL-E represent a boom, a bust, or a boondoggle. What we can say is that the proverbial genie is out of the bottle, and it isn’t going back in. ChatGPT is so widely adopted now that it is rapidly becoming commonplace. Educators are adapting to this, some reluctantly, others enthusiastically.
Whether you know it now or not, you will surely be using ChatGPT, or similar services, in very short order. The future is here, now.
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