Everything you need to know about AI but don’t dare ask

() — The executives of the companies they don’t stop talking of it. Teachers wonder what to do about it. and artists like Drake They seem angry at the situation.

Love it or hate it, everyone is paying attention to artificial intelligence right now. Almost overnight, a new generation of AI tools found its way into products used by billions of people, changing the way we work, shop, create, and communicate with each other.

AI advocates highlight the potential of this technology to increase our productivity, creating a new era of better jobs, better education, and better treatments for disease. AI skeptics express concern about the technology’s potential to disrupt jobs, mislead people and perhaps bring about the end of humanity as we know it. Some Silicon Valley executives seem to hold both views at once.

What is clear, however, is that AI is not going away, but it is changing very quickly. This is all you need to know to stay up to date.

What is AI?

In the public consciousness, “artificial intelligence” can conjure up images of killing machines eager to outdo humans, and capable of doing so. But in the tech industry, it’s a broad term that refers to different tools trained to perform a wide range of complex tasks that might previously have required human input.

If you use the Internet, you are almost certainly using AI-powered services to sort data, filter content, make suggestions, and more.

It’s the technology that enables Netflix to recommend movies and helps remove spam, hate speech, and other inappropriate content from social media. It helps power everything from autocorrect features and Google Translate to facial recognition services, the latter of which uses AI that, in Microsoft’s words“mimics the human ability to recognize human faces.”

AI can also succeed in developing techniques to solve a wide range of real-world problems, such as adjusting traffic signals in real time to manage congestion issues or helping medical professionals analyze images to make a diagnosis. . AI is also critical to the development of self-driving vehicles, as it processes vast amounts of visual data so that vehicles can understand their surroundings.

Why is everyone talking about AI now?

The answer is short: ChatGPT.

For years, AI took a backseat to the services we use every day. That changed after the November launch of ChatGPT, a viral chatbot that brought the power of AI to the fore.

People have already used ChatGPT, a tool created by OpenAI, to draft lawsuits, write song lyrics, and create summaries of research papers so good they even fooled some scientists. The tool even passed standardized tests. And ChatGPT sparked intense competition among tech companies to develop and deploy similar tools.

Microsoft and Google introduced features based on generative AI, the technology on which ChatGPT is based, into their most widely used productivity tools. Meta, Amazon and Alibaba said they are also working on generative AI tools. And many other companies want to get in on the action, too.

It’s not often that cutting-edge technology becomes ubiquitous overnight. Now businesses, educators, and lawmakers are scrambling to adapt.

How exactly does generative AI work?

Generative AI allows tools to create written work, images, and even audio in response to user input.

To get those answers, several big tech companies have developed their own language models from vast amounts of online data. The scope and purpose of these data sets may vary. For example, the version of ChatGPT that was released last year was only trained on data up to 2021 (now it’s more up to date).

These models work through a method called deep learning, which learns patterns and relationships between words, so it can make predictive responses and output relevant to user input.

How is Generative AI different from AGI?

As impressive as some generative AI services may seem, they are essentially just pattern matching. These tools can mimic the writing of others or make predictions about which words might be relevant in your responses based on all the data they’ve been previously trained on.

The AGI, for its part, promises something more ambitious and terrifying.

AGI — short for artificial general intelligence — refers to technology capable of performing intelligent tasks such as learning, reasoning, and adapting to new situations in the same way that humans do. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, teased the possibility of a super-intelligent AGI that could change the world, or perhaps backfire and end humanity.

At the moment, however, the AGI remains purely hypothetical, so don’t worry too much about it.

To what extent is the AI ​​gold rush pure hype?

Whenever there’s an excess of rumors surrounding a technology, it’s good to be skeptical, and there’s certainly a lot of that here. Investor fascination with AI has helped turn Wall Street into a bull market again, despite lingering economic uncertainty.

Not all AI tools are equally useful, and many companies will undoubtedly tout AI features and strategies simply to take advantage of the current hype cycle. But even in the last six months, AI has already shown its potential to change the way people perform many everyday tasks.

One of the main selling points for AI chatbots, for example, is their ability to increase people’s productivity. Earlier this year, some real estate agents told that ChatGPT saved them hours of work by not only writing listings of homes for sale, but also looking up permitted uses for certain land and calculating what mortgage payments or yield might be. investment for a client, which typically involves mortgage formulas and calculators.

Artificial intelligence is also much broader than ChatGPT and other generative AI tools. Even if you think AI chatbots are annoying or might just be a fad, the underlying technology will continue to drive significant advances in products and services for years to come.

Will it take my job?

It is feared that AI will eliminate millions of jobs. The hope is that it will help improve the way millions of people do their jobs. The current reality is somewhere in between.

Companies are likely to need new workers to help them implement and manage AI tools. Employment of data analysts and scientists, machine learning specialists, and cybersecurity experts is expected to grow by 30% on average through 2027, according to a recent estimate from the World Economic Forum (WEF).

But the proliferation of AI is also likely to jeopardize many functions. According to the WEF, by 2027 there could be 26 million fewer administrative and record-keeping jobs. The biggest losses are expected to hit data entry clerks and executive secretaries.

By now, it’s clear that AI can’t do the job of a human being on its own. When CNET, a news outlet, experimented with using AI to write articles, it came under scrutiny for publishing articles with factual errors. Also, in May, a lawyer made headlines for subpoenaing to a judge bogus court cases provided to him by ChatGPT. In an affidavit, the lawyer said that he had never used ChatGPT as a legal research tool and was “unaware of the possibility that its content could be false.”

Is AI dangerous?

Senior executives warn that AI could cause the extinction of the human being. But these same executives are also rushing to embed the technology into their products.

Some experts say that focusing on far-off catastrophic scenarios can distract from the more immediate harm AI can cause, such as spreading misinformation, perpetuating biases that exist in training data, and enabling discrimination.

For example, generative AI could be used to create deepfakes to spread propaganda during an election or enable a terrifying new era of scams. Some AI models are also criticized for what the industry calls “hallucination,” or making up information.

Even before the rise of ChatGPT, there were concerns that AI would act as a gatekeeper that can determine who advances and who doesn’t in a hiring process, for example. AI-based facial recognition systems have also led to some mistaken arrests, and research has shown that these systems are dramatically more prone to errors when trying to match the faces of darker-skinned people.

The more AI tools are incorporated into critical parts of society, the more potential there is for unintended consequences.

Where is the AI ​​going?

Regulators in the United States and Europe are pushing for legislation to help put up barriers to AI, which could ultimately influence the development of the technology. But it’s not clear that lawmakers can keep up with the rapid advances in AI.

Experts believe that in the coming months, generative AI will create even more realistic images, video, and audio that could further disrupt media, entertainment, technology, and other industries. Technology is likely to become increasingly conversational and personalized.

In March, OpenAI introduced GPT-4, the next generation version of the technology that powers ChatGPT. According to the company and early tests, GPT-4 is capable of providing more detailed and accurate written answers, passing academic exams with high marks, and building a functional website from a hand-drawn sketch. (Altman said earlier that OpenAI does not yet train GPT-5).

AI will almost certainly be incorporated into many more products and services in the coming months. That means we will all have to learn to live with it.

As ChatGPT said in response to a question: “AI has the potential to transform our lives…but it’s crucial that businesses and individuals are aware of the risks involved and responsibly address the concerns.”