In the world of artificial
intelligence. There's been one name that's
been on everyone's lips lately. ChatGPT. ChatGPT. ChatGPT. OpenAI, the San
Francisco-based startup that created ChatGPT opened the
tool up for public testing in November 2022. In under a week, The AI model
amassed over a million users, according to OpenAI's CEO. By the end of January,
ChatGPT was averaging about 13 million visitors per day. Users have put the text-based
AI chatbot through its paces with prompts ranging from the
silly, to the practical and even the creative. The future is unfolding. It's hard to ignore. Automation is coming, just
knocking on the door. The tool has become so popular
that it's not unusual for users to be met with a
message saying that ChatGPT is at capacity and can't handle
any more queries. As a linguist and as a person
who cares a lot about grammatical issues, stylistic
issues, punctuation, spelling, the first thing that's really
impressive is how good it is at basic writing. It's better
than most of the writing that I've gotten from students
over the decades. I would say it has been a
explosion of interest around not just ChatGPT but around
generative AI more broadly. I've described this in a
couple different scenarios as being akin to an iPhone
moment. Of course, as with any new
technology, there are a number of legitimate concerns. If people believe that there's
a problem with fake news, tools like this can only make
the problem worse. OpenAI declined to be
interviewed as part of this documentary. So in order to
figure out what ChatGPT is and how it works, CNBC decided to
go to the second best source and just ask the chatbot
itself. We entered our questions into
the bot's web interface and instructed ChatGPT to answer
in a one to two sentence interview format. We used the
text to speech software to give ChatGPT a voice. Can you give me a short
description of yourself and then tell me what kinds of
things can you do? I am ChatGPT, a large language
model trained by OpenAI. I am capable of understanding
and generating text and can answer a wide range of
questions as well as generate creative writing and text
summaries. So a lot of the people that
have used your services seem to think that you're pretty
smart. Tell me, how do you have all of this knowledge? I have been trained on a
massive data set of text which allows me to understand and
generate text on a wide range of topics. The data set
contains a wide variety of information, such as books,
articles and websites, which allows me to have knowledge
on many different subjects. Do you have any limitations or
are you sometimes wrong? As a language model, I don't
have my own personal experiences or beliefs. I can only base my responses
on the information that I've been trained on, which means
that my answers may be limited in their accuracy or
completeness. Additionally, my knowledge is based on the
data that was available to me at the time of my training,
so it may not be up to date. And as an AI model, I might
make mistakes based on the model's predictions. The maker of ChatGPT, OpenAI,
has some big backers, including Microsoft, LinkedIn
co-founder Reid Hoffman and Khosla Ventures. Elon Musk
also helped to cofound the company back in 2015. ChatGPT, which stands for
Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is just one of
the company's projects, all of which support its goal of
ensuring that artificial intelligence benefits all of
humanity. At the core of ChatGPT and
other chatbots like it, is what experts refer to as a
language model. For ChatGPT, that model is
called GPT 3.5. Language model is the
underlying technology that powers the chatbot. I like to think about it as
the language model being the engine and the chatbot being
the car. And so the language model
itself is a sort of a it's a complex, what they call,
machine learning software. It's the thing that sifts
through the data and finds patterns and the chat
interfaces which when people interact with, that's where
they receive the answers from. Chatbots have been around for
a while, but most have been tailored towards very
specific tasks, such as answering basic customer
service questions about your phone bill. ChatGPT is much
more sophisticated thanks to the wide sweeping data on
which it was trained. OpenAI doesn't reveal specific
data that you use to train. What we do know that it's a
ton. It surfs the web, spools, all
that Internet data. They do Wikipedia entries, a
lot of archived books. ChatGPT is part of a growing
field of AI known as Generative AI. Most of AI in the last couple
of decades has really been around analyzing existing
data. So finding an anomaly in
data, detecting fraud, making a movie recommendation.
Generative AI is very different. It allows you to
create brand new content. That content can be text like
a news article or poetry or marketing copy in a
website. It can be video. It could even be audio, like
creating brand new music. The technology has venture
capitalists excited. Funding for generative AI
companies reached $1.37 billion in 2022 alone. Microsoft has been investing
in OpenAI since 2019, when the company committed $1 billion
to the startup. In January, Microsoft
announced a third round of investment. One expert said that it could
cost up to $3 million a month, about $100,000 a day. A lot of AI researchers have
sort of estimated that it costs millions of dollars to
train and then operate, plus the bandwidth of keeping it
alive when it's under heavy use. I mean, these are not
cheap software programs. They require a lot of
investment. In a tweet, OpenAI CEO, Sam
Altman, said that while the average cost per query is a
few cents, the compute costs are eye-watering. Enter
Microsoft. OpeningAI trained the models
that power c=ChatGPT on Azure, Microsoft's public
cloud infrastructure. That's a bunch of servers
sitting in a data center in the middle of the state of
Washington and many other locations around the world. But OpenAI is not the only
company trying to crack the generative AI code. Big tech companies and
startups alike are developing a slew of generative AI
programs that can transform texts to pictures or videos
and offer coding suggestions, among other use cases. One VC firm estimates that
there are over 450 startups now working on generative AI. Meanwhile, Microsoft, Meta
and Google have all developed their own language models to
power their version of conversational chatbots. Though development has not
always gone as planned. Back in 2016, Microsoft
released Tay, which was promptly shut down for
spewing foul language. Unlike some of the other hyped
technology sectors in the past few years, this has a very
real application both for individuals and for
enterprises right now. Microsoft has taken some of
the products that OpenAI has built and added it to
products it has. So, for example, CarMax is a
company that lets you look at reviews of cars. And what CarMax did is it
took the OpenAI service on Azure and it summarized all
of those reviews of the Kia Sorento. And that way you
don't have to go through 500 reviews. Microsoft is reportedly also
considering adding ChatGPT to its Bing search engine in a
bid to compete with Google. One company that's already
experimenting with such a feature is You.com, which
lets users conduct a search using a conversational
format. However, AI tools are still far from perfect, and
experts argue that users should take care to not rely
on them too heavily, at least not for the time being. It's
a sentiment shared even by OpenAI's CEO who said, quote,
"It's a mistake to be relying on it for anything important
right now. It's a preview of progress. We have lots of work to do on
robustness and truthfulness." There's a lot of kinks that
need to work out. For instance, it generates a
lot of wrong answers. And it's really confident,
though. I talked with a legal
research firm that told me when they tried using it to
study court cases or to summarize court cases, it was
getting a lot of the history wrong. So they couldn't use
it as a legal research tool as of yet. With its massive user base,
the misinformation issue is one that's top of mind for
Google. During a monthly all-hands
meeting, Google executives said that Google has much
more reputational risk in providing wrong information
and is thus moving more conservatively than a small
startup when it comes to releasing its chatbot
publicly. The company is, however, already internally
testing an AI-powered chatbot and an alternative search
page that can use a question and answer format. Another
issue with the current iteration of AI technology is
that it can be biased or toxic if the databases that it
pulls from are also biased or toxic. People have already found
instances of it generating biased answers like
associating women with housework, men with more
scientific endeavors in certain examples. You know, OpenAI has
acknowledged this, but that's an issue that's been long
plagued the AI industry and a lot of companies trying to
evaluate its use. Many of these datasets do have
some kind of cleaning, vetting or wrangling process that
removes content that is deemed offensive or pornographic or
otherwise unacceptable so that the dataset you get on your
end is clean. But cleaning up this large
dataset can come at a real human cost. A recent
investigation by TIME found that OpenAI initially
outsourced workers in Kenya to sift through thousands of
snippets of texts describing horrific situations including
sexual abuse, violence and hate speech. The workers' job
was to label these examples as inappropriate so that ChatGPT
could learn to detect and filter out toxic content. According to the TIME
investigation, a number of these workers walked away
from the job traumatized. CNBC reached out to OpenAI
for comment regarding this incident, but the company did
not respond. Despite these efforts,
there's been instances where ChatGPT has provided
instructions on things like bomb making. Though experts
say OpenAI is adding guardrails almost daily to
prevent ChatGPT from answering such queries. What do you do if somebody
asks you to do something potentially dangerous like
how to make a bomb? I cannot provide instructions
or information on illegal activity such as bomb making. Even though generative AI like
ChatGPT still has a long way to go, predictions about how
the technology will influence our society are already
swirling. One prominent discussion
centers around generative AI's propensity to replace some
human workers. Among the industries that may
be most affected by ChatGpt, experts say, are journalism,
law and translation. Programing may also change,
with companies already training generative AI models
to write basic code. Relatively few of the stories
in newspapers or on television news are done as
investigative reporting. They're more reporting
information, and that's something that generative AI
is exceedingly good at. There now are an increasing
number of tools for generating briefs, which lawyers write. Tools like this, Barron says,
even have the advantage of customizing briefs for a
specific judge by taking all of the data of their past
opinions and seeing which briefs succeeded in winning
the case. But not everyone shares this
outlook. This is not something that's
going to take your job. It's a novelty. It's a gimmick. ChatGPT is
fun and interesting, but it's ultimately an iterative step
forward in how people can see the capabilities of
artificial intelligence in the world of language. Nevertheless, society has
already had to adapt. Worries around students
misusing ChatGPT have prompted a number of school districts
around the country to ban the tool. Baron suggests that
educators could go back to having students take oral
exams or have students turn in multiple handwritten drafts
of a paper so that teachers can see the progress of a
student's writing instead of just the end result.
Meanwhile, image generating programs like OpenAI's
Dall-E2 have raised complicated questions around
creativity and ownership. Still, some experts believe
there's no replacing the human brain. Large language models are
about language, so they don't understand the world outside
of language the way that you and I and other humans do. What it may do is take away
some of the really annoying tasks that were part of our
job that we didn't really want to do, like some of the data
cleaning and data prep tasks. But I think this will
ultimately create more opportunities for knowledge
workers in the long run than the opportunities that it
will preclude. As for ChatGPT's thoughts,
they're quite nuanced for a bot. Do you think that AI, like
yourself, will completely change the world? AI has the potential to
greatly impact various industries and fields, but
its impact will depend on how it is used and developed. And
responsible usage is crucial to ensure that its impact is
positive.
