Although it doesn’t have as cool a name as Alexa, Siri or even Hal, ChatGPT is the latest and most advanced foray into the technology known as artificial intelligence, or AI. What exactly is ChatGPT, what’s it good for and why are some folks scared of it?
ChatGPT (chat.openai.com) is a language model developed by OpenAI. It uses deep learning techniques to generate humanlike text. It can be fine-tuned for specific tasks such as conversation and language translation, and has been trained on a massive dataset of internet text. It is considered a state-of-the-art model for natural language-processing tasks.
The above paragraph is a response to the ChatGPT query, “explain chatgpt in 75 words or less.” (After all, even though this newspaper is available online, space is still constrained due to its print-oriented origin.) This response was generated in a matter of seconds.
That response, in and of itself, answers all three of our questions. ChatGPT is a seemingly endless store of information, and has answers for darn near everything. Ask it any factual question and it will have an answer. ChatGPT itself is somewhat modest when asked about its capabilities — “it may not be aware of the most recent events or latest developments since its training data cutoff date in 2021” — but we have not found any legitimate questions for which it could not find a reasonable, fair answer.
What’s in its training data? We asked it, and this is what it said: “ChatGPT was trained on a massive dataset of internet text, which includes a wide range of information such as books, articles, websites, and forums. The training data includes a variety of topics, such as news, science, history, literature, and more. The model also was trained on a diverse set of text styles, including formal and informal language, technical writing, and creative writing. The dataset also includes text from a variety of sources such as Wikipedia, Common Crawl and other sources. The exact details of the dataset are proprietary information of OpenAI, but it is known that it contains a vast amount of text from the internet that enables the model to have a wide range of information and knowledge.”
The responses provided above are enough to give most pause. What are the implications? Will jobs be displaced? As of this writing, ChatGPT is not really that great at programming, even the simplest tasks in the simplest languages, including scripting, device configuration and other programminglike endeavors. So most IT folks are safe … for now.
Still, it’s easy to see how the technology could affect jobs like content creation, translators or customer service. When asked, in several different ways, what kind of jobs ChatGPT can replace, it consistently responds with a variation of “AI is not meant to replace jobs, just make actual people’s jobs easier.” Which, of course, is what one would expect it to say.
Currently, ChatGPT is itself resource-constrained; more than once it has responded with “I’m too busy now, try again later.” This typically happens during mainland peak hours, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Pacific time. So if you want to spend some time exploring, the best time to try is typically Hawaii pau hana time.
John Agsalud is an IT expert with more than 25 years of information technology experience in Hawaii and around the world. He can be reached at jagsalud@live.com.
