If you'd told me three years ago that in 2023 there will be dudes on the Internet celebrating some A.I. service anniversary I would have simply told you to fuck off. I knew A.I. was coming, it was "announced through the SF movies of the '80s" and somehow was expecting its coming, but not even for a second I could envision it would gain traction so fast and it would be so impactful.
I just noticed on my laptop's default windows search bar that there's a Bing logo next to the "type to search" message that the search bar shows by default. That means that if I want to use the search option for anything on my laptop or on the internet the service will use Bing(A.I.).
ChatGPT is already a few months old, but its GPT-4 update(upgrade, or whatever the fuck that is) is turning two weeks old. Can you believe that? The A.I. service is just two weeks old and there's so much fuzz around it all over the internet already. Its older sibling "the first ChatGPT", which plenty of you have tried already, has managed to amass 100 million users in its first month live.
We were blessed with it for free, at first, as anything else that needs a bit of exposure and traffic before it starts to take off, but now you have to pay for the "better and enhanced usability" of such a service. ChatGPT has been created and developed over time by OpenAI, a company that got its first $100 million in funding from Elon Musk and "promised" to be an open-source project.
Now that it has managed to establish itself as a public company(no longer being open source) it's got its first serious investor. Bill Gates, the man who made a lot of money with the covid vaccines during the pandemic, sold recently his stocks in such companies and bought shares in OpenAI. Some say that we might see Microsoft A.I.-powered smartphones in the future, so get ready guys...
Meanwhile, let's see what this ChatGPT thing managed to disrupt, so far... Well, while the regular thing that everyone can have access to is "quite general" in expressing and sharing its knowledge, GPT-4 has some aces hidden in its back pocket. So, what can you actually do with it?
Well, give it $100 and ask him to make money for you based on that $100 and he will do that for you, ask it to create a video game from scratch and it will do that in seconds, or a website, have it write your e-mails for you, create new businesses, write content(as some of us are doing around here), create the code to hack someone's computer, build apps, etc, etc.
A.I. has immense power for disruption and there are many individuals cheering that up right now. 8% of workers that use ChatGPT said that they have not yet told their bosses that they use artificial intelligence at work. Out of 4,500 professionals, it was found that only 27% of them used AI at work, per BI.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said recently: "[AI] is going to eliminate a lot of current jobs, but we can make much better ones", and he also confessed that A.I. could pose economic shocks or disinformation problems "at a level far beyond anything we're prepared for". But we still keep on cheering up for A.I. and continue to work on making it smarter and more capable by the day.
Hurray!
This gold rush on A.I. that we're witnessing right now will only increase the competition among us and whoever is taking any job right now by using A.I. from who knows what pleb who's not yet using A.I. will find himself in the same position in the future when "better and more prepared" job hunters will come for the same jobs...
At one point some companies won't even need to have to hire much personnel anymore as A.I. will do the job of 10 employees. That's when we will realize that A.I. taking over is not something we should applaud or encourage too much. Moreover, such powerful tools will get into the hands of the authorities as well who will be more capable of policing us than they were so far.
Smart cameras, smart cities, smartphones, A.I., automation, excessive automation, etc, etc, etc. These will come packed with some downsides to all the goodies we are having access to right now. Exponential growth means exponential repercussions as well, in case you haven't thought about that. I might sound a bit outdated with such thinking but what I see happening right now with A.I. is something similar to feeding the baddest wolf out there so you can have it guard your sheep.
What will stop it from eating them himself? What will stop A.I. from eating your lunch next time?... Probably days after it helped you eat someone else's. I don't know about you but I'm not excited about too much human-machine blending. That's the angle from which I see the insane rise of A.I. that we're witnessing right now. What do you think?
Thanks for your attention,
Adrian