Trends in Artificial Intelligence — Chat GPT (by Ben Zysberg, Director of Technology @ iXperiential Media)

You might have heard of or even played with ChatGPT, an insanely powerful chatbot. It’s based on GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), which is an advanced artificial intelligence language model developed by OpenAI. Essentially it is a computer program that has been trained to understand and generate human-like text based on the input it receives. Think of it as a super-smart conversationalist that can read and write in multiple languages, answer questions, and generate creative content.

To explain it in simpler terms, imagine GPT as a very intelligent digital assistant that can help you with various tasks, like writing emails, providing information, or even creating unique content. It learns from a massive amount of text data found on the internet and uses complex algorithms to process and understand language patterns, allowing it to generate text that sounds natural and coherent. In Marvel terms, it’s not Ultron or Vision yet but it’s pretty close to Jarvis (the natural language computer system AI assistant to Iron Man- Tony Stark).

With a simple prompt, ChatGPT can answer pretty much any question — on top of that it can also generate news articles, stories, poems, songs, …. and even code! As a joke, I asked it to write a fake press release that ended up sounding surprisingly coherent. As of now it can only answer questions but because it is using a conversation system it learns from the previous answers. GPT-4 is the new version that was just released. On top of being more powerful, it can now use images as prompt. We’re at the point where we can create a simple website from a sketch drawing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0bGZffYUNs

Microsoft has taken this technology even further. Microsoft being the main investor behind OpenAI- is developing a new version of Bing (currently in beta) that is using GPT-4. This combines search engine and AI which is a pretty big deal. You see, GPT is using is a fixed dataset meaning that it only had access to a limited amount of information. It doesn’t know that happened after the dataset was trained. By combining it with a search engine, it gives access to the entire web to GPT. If the thought of that makes you feel like we are playing with fire, you are correct. Nobody knows the full socio-economic implications of the AI revolution. Entire professions might disappear overnight. The way we interact with computers is never going to be the same. Perhaps the people in charge should have read a few sci-fi/cyberpunk books before unleashing this to the world. One thing is for sure: everybody is jumping on the train. Google for example massively changed their plans to release their own AI products at a faster rate, especially a competitor to ChatGPT. It’s about survival at this point. If you use ChatGPT or Bing, then you’re not using Google. If you’re not using Google, you’re not seeing the ads and Google Ads still account for 80% of Alphabet’s revenue (Alphabet is the parent company of Google).

With all of this AI computing power you’re probably thinking that it must require some giant super-computers- well, you’re only half-right. Training the model (aka making the software learn from a dataset) does require a super-powerful computer. Microsoft spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build a super-computer able to train GPT-4 including buying thousands of Nvidia high-end GPUs. However, once it’s trained — running the model (asking questions and getting answers) only requires a decent computer. LLaMA, Meta’s competitor to GPT-3, has leaked to the general public and can run on a laptop and even a phone. No cloud needed.

What does that mean for a company like iXperiential? Not much for now. Our work especially in the aerospace and defense sector is to develop things that either don’t exist yet and/or is not available to the general public. It’s also so detailed and custom tailor-made that it cannot be generated by an AI. However as the tech expands and permeates the tech space it’s slowly going to become a tool that will use on a daily basis to automate simple tasks ranging from writing CSS code to finding an adequate font or even writing generic social media posts.