As the sudden explosion of public interest in ChatGPT continues to excite millions, we ask: Is this the tipping point for machine-driven conversation (and more)? Is ChatGPT the Netscape of our time?
In Fortune’s The inside story of ChatGPT: How OpenAI founder Sam Altman built the world’s hottest technology with billions from Microsoft, author Jeremy Kahn helpfully explains OpenAI’s history, structure, financing, and much more — at 6K words, the article covers a lot of territory. Kahn cuts straight to The Big Moment scenario in his opening paragraph [emphasis mine]:
“A few times in a generation, a product comes along that catapults a technology from the fluorescent gloom of engineering department basements, the fetid teenage bedrooms of nerds, and the lonely man caves of hobbyists — into something that your great-aunt Edna knows how to use. There were web browsers as early as 1990. But it wasn’t until Netscape Navigator came along in 1994 that most people discovered the internet. There were MP3 players before the iPod debuted in 2001, but they didn’t spark the digital music revolution. There were smartphones before Apple dropped the iPhone in 2007 too — but before the iPhone, there wasn’t an app for that.” Read More
Monthly Archives: January 2023
The generative AI revolution has begun—how did we get here?
A new class of incredibly powerful AI models has made recent breakthroughs possible.
Progress in AI systems often feels cyclical. Every few years, computers can suddenly do something they’ve never been able to do before. “Behold!” the AI true believers proclaim, “the age of artificial general intelligence is at hand!” “Nonsense!” the skeptics say. “Remember self-driving cars?”
The truth usually lies somewhere in between.
We’re in another cycle, this time with generative AI. Media headlines are dominated by news about AI art, but there’s also unprecedented progress in many widely disparate fields. Everything from videos to biology, programming, writing, translation, and more is seeing AI progress at the same incredible pace. Read More
AI Detector Pro is latest tool to detect ChatGPT-written content
A newly available online tool can purportedly detect AI-written content from ChatGPT and similar systems. Called AI Detector Pro, it works by identifying commonly-used styling and wording used by OpenAI’s GPT-based algorithms.
… Similarly, Stanford researchers announced DetectGPT to identify content created by large language models like ChatGPT. Read More
ChatGPT passes exams from law and business schools
ChatGPT is smart enough to pass prestigious graduate-level exams – though not with particularly high marks.
The powerful new AI chatbot tool recently passed law exams in four courses at the University of Minnesota and another exam at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, according to professors at the schools.
To test how well ChatGPT could generate answers on exams for the four courses, professors at the University of Minnesota Law School recently graded the tests blindly. After completing 95 multiple choice questions and 12 essay questions, the bot performed on average at the level of a C+ student, achieving a low but passing grade in all four courses.
ChatGPT fared better during a business management course exam at Wharton, where it earned a B to B- grade. In a paper detailing the performance, Christian Terwiesch, a Wharton business professor, said ChatGPT did “an amazing job” at answering basic operations management and process-analysis questions but struggled with more advanced prompts and made “surprising mistakes” with basic math. Read More
Decoding the Hype About AI
A conversation with Arvind Narayanan
If you have been reading all the hype about the latest artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, you might be excused for thinking that the end of the world is nigh.
The clever AI chat program has captured the imagination of the public for its ability to generate poems and essays instantaneously, its ability to mimic different writing styles, and its ability to pass some law and business school exams.
Teachers are worried students will use it to cheat in class (New York City public schools have already banned it). Writers are worried it will take their jobs (BuzzFeed and CNET have already started using AI to create content). The Atlantic declared that it could “destabilize white-collar work.” Venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky called it a “pocket nuclear bomb” and chastised its makers for launching it on an unprepared society.
Even the CEO of the company that makes ChatGPT, Sam Altman, has been telling the media that the worst-case scenario for AI could mean “lights out for all of us.” Read More
AI Task Force Asks Congress for $2.6B to Stand Up R&D Hub
The White House-led National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Resource (NAIRR) Task Force is asking Congress for $2.6 billion to fund its plans to stand up a national research infrastructure that would broaden access to the resources essential to AI research and development (R&D).
In a final report released on Tuesday, the task force estimated the NAIRR – a Federal AI data and research hub – would need $2.6 billion in congressional appropriations over its first six years to reach initial operating capacity. Read More
MusicLM: Generating Music From Text
Abstract We introduce MusicLM, a model generating high-fidelity music from text descriptions such as “a calming violin melody backed by a distorted guitar riff”. MusicLM casts the process of conditional music generation as a hierarchical sequence-to-sequence modeling task, and it generates music at 24 kHz that remains consistent over several minutes. Our experiments show that MusicLM outperforms previous systems both in audio quality and adherence to the text description. Moreover, we demonstrate that MusicLM can be conditioned on both text and a melody in that it can transform whistled and hummed melodies according to the style described in a text caption. To support future research, we publicly release MusicCaps, a dataset composed of 5.5k music-text pairs, with rich text descriptions provided by human experts. Read More
A Skeptical Take on the A.I. Revolution
The year 2022 was jam-packed with advances in artificial intelligence, from the release of image generators like DALL-E 2 and text generators like Cicero to a flurry of developments in the self-driving car industry. And then, on November 30, OpenAI released ChatGPT, arguably the smartest, funniest, most humanlike chatbot to date.
In the weeks since, ChatGPT has become an internet sensation. If you’ve spent any time on social media recently, you’ve probably seen screenshots of it describing Karl Marx’s theory of surplus value in the style of a Taylor Swift song or explaining how to remove a sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible. There are hundreds of examples like that.
But amid all the hype, I wanted to give voice to skepticism: What is ChatGPT actually doing? Is this system really as “intelligent” as it can sometimes appear? And what are the implications of unleashing this kind of technology at scale? Read More
When May a Robot Kill? New DOD Policy Tries to Clarify
An updated policy tweaks wording in a bid to dispel confusion.
Did you think the Pentagon had a hard rule against using lethal autonomous weapons? It doesn’t. But it does have hoops to jump through before such a weapon might be deployed—and, as of Wednesday, a revised policy intended to clear up confusion.
The biggest change in the Defense Department’s new version of its 2012 doctrine on lethal autonomous weapons is a clearer statement that it is possible to build and deploy them safely and ethically but not without a lot of oversight Read More
Humanity May Reach Singularity Within Just 7 Years, Trend Shows
By one major metric, artificial general intelligence is much closer than you think.
- By one unique metric, we could approach technological singularity by the end of this decade, if not sooner.
- A translation company developed a metric, Time to Edit (TTE), to calculate the time it takes for professional human editors to fix AI-generated translations compared to human ones. This may help quantify the speed toward singularity.
- An AI that can translate speech as well as a human could change society.
#singularity
Rick's Cafe AI 