How does ChatGPT work?
My philosophical view about the future of AI is that it will lead to a utopian society where humans and machines work together to create a better world. According to this view, AI will enable us to solve many of the world’s problems, including poverty, disease, and environmental degradation, and free us from the burden of menial tasks so we can focus on more creative pursuits.
ChatGPT (May,23)
A lot of people seem to miss-understand ChatGPT. Now a days, there’s a ton of buzz online about this topic. In my opinion, most of the people overhype it, and others underestimate it. Here is a simple thing, I agree ChatGPT is a ‘hype’, yet, many are going to lose their jobs! pretty soon, pretty fast! Here’s a short explanation…
Human Mind vs ChatGPT
Starting with human mind. Consider your brain as a big hotel with thousands of rooms. Each room has some knowledge of a specific topic. One contains all the knowledge you have about politics, another about your musical taste. One that with the memories of your last trip, another the things you know about Justin Bieber. You got the point, there are thousands of things you know, hence thousands of rooms! It’s easy to get lost in this big hotel, so we need someone to help us find the right thing.
Attention is all you Need
Call Mr. Attention for our help, our assistant. He has a boring sounding name, but knows which room contains what and on which floor!
Mr. Attention has only one job to do, to give you the knowledge that you want. When you think about Rahul Gandhi, he will collect the knowledge from political room, when you think about Lata Mangeshkar, the music room. You can even combine multiple topics, give me a memory where PM Modi talked about Rocket Science; Politics+Science!
Mr. Attention is good at it. He knows where to put ‘attention’. Where did he learn this skill? Answer is simple, it’s called millions of years of evolution! Brain, the most complex form of neural net, has been evolving even before humans existed. Mr. Attention has been perfecting his skills for the thousands of years now.
What is the relationship of Attention with ChatGPT?
We have to take one step back. We said our brain is a hotel with rooms full of knowledge. Well, there’s plenty of knowledge available on the internet. What if we create someone like Mr. Attention for the internet? There comes ChatGPT!
It has knowledge base of trillions and trillions of rooms, from quantum computing to the Justin Bieber lyrics. It knows where to find What. But wait, we have google for it, right? Then,
Difference between google and ChatGPT
Answer is simple, google can only guide you to the rooms of knowledge. It can not to peek into the room and see if relevant! ChatGPT knows every room inside out. This feature of ChatGPT is simply called as Attention Mechanism.
Attention Mechanism
You can ask it anything, can tell it to create anything. You can even combine things, write a Modi Speech in Bhojpuri. It will collect its Modi speech knowledge; how he speaks, which words he uses, which things he talks about. It will collect its bhojpuri knowledge, and combines the two! Can google do that? Nope
You can ask it to explain theory of relativity to a 10 year old, to write a letter of resignation (haha), write a research paper. It can solve your grammatical mistakes, code for you, chat with others for you!. Heck! most of the sentences you read above are written by ChatGPT (did you notice?)
Pretty good, eh? A personal assistant with super knowledge base! Not to forget, it has learned trillions and trillions of GBs of human data in just matter of days! Yup, the hype is real.
ChatGPT is going to affect Jobs
What we are seeing now is just the beginning of a new era of technology which we call AGI (artificial general intelligence). Currently ChatGPT has few limitations. Unlike our Mr. Attention, ChatGPT is not that accurate in finding the correct room. Plus, it does not contain any knowledge after 2021. So no post Covid blabber. Also, most importantly, it can not create its own room i.e. its own knowledge!
ChatGPT has no Common Sense
ChatGPT has nothing that can be considered as general knowledge. The answers it produces are the amalgamation of all the dataset. If it knows about Amazon Rainforest, most of its ‘knowledge’ comes from thousands articles, blogs, news and websites online. It is good at compressing knowledge. It can give you entire movie plot in few sentences, with surprisingly good accuracy, can even write a script for movie of your dreams, but this would be a mere REMIX of the movies it knows, nothing new!
Problem of alignment
ChatGPT can become better by simply training of bigger, better data. And we have a lot of that already on the internet. But internet can be a brutal place to learn things. There are many things on the internet which are not desirable to learn, racism, sexism, any other forms of discriminations. All the false knowledge, the fake news. So we need to control in order to make it fair for everything. Currently, people do it manually.
You are not going to lose job
ChatGPT is far from snatching jobs from the general public yet. It lacs one major thing that every human on the planet has i.e common sense. It can not understand the difference between a racial comment and a non racial comment, can not say something is fake news.
But the future is not far. It is important to remember one thing, the paper which made foundation for ChatGPT was released just 5 years ago! Within just five years, the industry has changed upside down. Who knows what will happen within next few years.
Age of AGI is not here yet
The AGI, the final goal, will have solved everything above. The AI that can create its own knowledge, discover things!. And it’s not far in the future. It is predicted that we will see such an AI before 2050! Anyone doing anything which can be automated, they will lose your job in next few years. But just like any other technology, it will create many other jobs, or maybe finally free us from jobs altogether. It’s time to hone new skills 🙃 (and learn some quantum mechanics, but that’s for another day)
Contact me anytime on [email protected] !
Leave a Reply