First thoughts after the release of ChatGPT

First thoughts after the release of ChatGPT

Berlin, January 11, 2023

Horst Buchwald

ChatGPT saw the light of day at the beginning of December 2022 and has fascinated well over a million users since then. Access is easy and the lightning fast responses won over the majority. There is hardly any criticism. Are the initiators OpenAI as developer and Microsoft as financier doing everything right? Can it even be that ChatGPT overshadows the search giant Google? Do all writers in the world have to give up their pens now? For an answer, I made a foray through the AI-oriented media landscape. Here is the report.

Anyone who hasn’t noticed it yet: although Microsoft has tried often enough to produce more than just consumptive Windows versions and overpriced Office packages and has repeatedly failed, the Gates Company continued to dig for „gold“ in „foreign“ fields. . Currently at the top of the list is the unsuccessful attempt to land right at the front of this booming market segment by taking over Activision Blizzard. But the competition authorities in both Great Britain and the USA are opposed to this. They fear a monopoly position.

OpenAI and Microsoft have been in partnership since 2019. At that time, the Gates Company already showed enough foresight and quickly put a billion dollars on the table – with the aim of promoting supercomputer technology in connection with AI. The Gates Company made its Clou infrastructure available for the computing-intensive applications. This is exactly what is now used by ChatGPT and the image generator DALL-E. This act earned Microsoft an exclusive license to use GPT-3.

Now, as a crowning act, ChatGPT is to be integrated into the Bing search engine and thus bring more benefits. No sooner was this announcement in the world than Google “Code Red” is said to have been triggered. That was probably meant as a joke. Because in order to get the search engine giant into trouble, OpenAI and Microsoft still have to come up with a few ideas. These hints may suffice for the time being: 1. The capabilities of ChatGPT have enormous potential. But to be „groundbreaking“, the ChatBot has to weigh a lot more. That this tool can perform numerous everyday tasks and solve many problems in record time, that it could one day become the king of all customer advisors or that it will inform thousands of patients in good time that they need to take their medicine, yes, that there are personalized learning programs for pupils and students and much more could offer more, that is becoming apparent, but for the time being it is still theory and not a product. The main thing missing is a business plan. Only then will it become clear whether ChatGPT will be unleashed as a „programmer“, writer, marketing genius or recipe inventor.

Who is better?

And what about Google? Will the team in Silicon Valley sleep badly because there is now a competitor in the starting blocks? No, Google will remain the “AI First Company” for the time being. Why? With DeepMind, the boys from Alphabet probably have one of the smartest and most creative troops in the stable. LaMDA has already indicated what they can do with a short appearance. In addition, this does not have to be the end of the road. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google already has LaMDA2 in reserve.

ChaGPT was asked: Is LaMDA better than ChatFGPT? Answer: “The two are not directly comparable. LaMDA is a machine learning technique developed by researchers at Google to improve the performance of natural language processing models, while ChatGPT is a specific implementation of the GPT (Generative Pre-Training Transformer) machine learning model developed by OpenAI. ….both are designed to solve different problems and can excel in different contexts.” Addition: typically the effectiveness of a machine learning model depends on the specific task it is used for and the quality of the Data to train with.

Of course, this answer did not satisfy the questioners and they pressed:

Do you think Google is superior to you?

Answer: „As an artificial intelligence, I have no personal opinions or beliefs…I am unable to assess the relative superiority of different organizations or entities.“

„… and saved a lot of time“

From my point of view, it is not important who is “better”, but who is ahead in terms of customer friendliness. In this case, you don’t have to start a highly scientific survey or write voluminous studies. Who is clear in this case is ChatGPT.

A sysadmin described it in two lines: He has a lot of work to do. When trying to search on google all it listed was a list of blue links. But this chat GPT provided the exact answer in one page and saved a lot of time.”

Could it be that the AI First Company has recognized the danger? I’m excited and excited that there will finally be a serious competitor in this market.

Finally, I would like to make a few remarks:

1. Neither ChatGPT nor LaMDA will eclipse human creativity.

2. They too are just tools. But: You will save us time and give us more scope for higher-value tasks. So they come at the right time. Because never before have people faced so many problems for which they have not yet found a solution. Let’s take the chance and use these and other tools for exactly these tasks: solutions

– to the climate catastrophe,

– to create a peaceful world,

– to deal with economic crises,

– Ban these and other AI tools for military use.