Stephen Shankland
CNET, Feb. 4, 2023
“You don’t have to look far to find accounts of the bot blowing people’s minds”
There’s a new AI bot in town: ChatGPT, and you’d better pay attention, even if you aren’t into artificial intelligence.
The tool, from a power player in artificial intelligence called OpenAI, lets you type natural-language prompts. ChatGPT offers conversational, if somewhat stilted, responses. The bot remembers the thread of your dialogue, using previous questions and answers to inform its next responses. It derives its answers from huge volumes of information on the internet.
ChatGPT is a big deal. The tool seems pretty knowledgeable in areas where there’s good training data for it to learn from. It’s not omniscient or smart enough to replace all humans yet, but it can be creative, and its answers can sound downright authoritative. A few days after its launch, more than a million people were trying out ChatGPT.
And it’s becoming big business. Microsoft pledged to invest billions of dollars into OpenAI, saying in January it’ll build features into cloud services. OpenAI announced a $20 per month ChatGPT Plus service that responds faster and gets new features sooner.
But be careful, warns ChatGPT’s creator, the for-profit research lab called OpenAI. “It’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now,” OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman tweeted. “We have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness. Here’s a look at why ChatGPT is important and what’s going on with it. [To read the full article, click here]