Artificial Intelligence helped us write this episode

Sascha: [00:00:02] From Equity Mates media. This is The Dive. I'm your host, Sascha Kelly. Here in Equity Mates office, our world has been rocked this week by a new artificial intelligence chat bot that can do some pretty crazy things for you. 

Audio Clip: [00:00:18] A new online chat bot is making waves on social media for both its precise and also painfully honest. 

Sascha: [00:00:24] Answer, right? A personal reference. Done. Draft an email to Elon Musk inviting him to come on The Dive. Done. Write a catchy rap song based on personal details of my life. Done. Write a 1500 word script on the future of artificial intelligence. Done. So while we've been having a lot of fun playing around with this chat, it also made us think about the future of work. Could many of our jobs be replaced by chatbots one day? Or is this new chat bot just an alternative to Google? It's Friday, the 9th of December and today I want to know what is Open AI Chat bot capable of doing? To talk about this today? I'm joined by Darcy Cordell. Darcy, I am so excited about this episode. I have been obsessed with Open AI chat bot. I've been spending a lot of time on it this week. 

Darcy: [00:01:16] I know you have, Sascha. Our group chats have been popping off with you, sending screenshots of this chat. 

Sascha: [00:01:22] So Open AI released chat GPT last week and already within a week over a million people have signed up to use it. What exactly is this bot and where has it come from? 

Darcy: [00:01:36] Sascha, we're not messing around here. I think the best way to show you how crazy this bot is is to basically let it write the episode for us. So I'm going to type your questions into the chat bot and we'll see what it has to say for us. 

Sascha: [00:01:47] Amazing. Let's walk through an example then. 

Darcy: [00:01:50] Okay. So I've just typed in Who Created You and what do you do is the response. 

Open AI: [00:01:56] I was created by a team of researchers at Open AI. Open AI a leading research institute in the field of artificial intelligence, and they are at the forefront of developing advanced language models. Like me, the team at Open AI trained me on the large corpus of text data and I am able to generate human-like responses based on the training. 

Sascha: [00:02:15] Wow. Well, that sounds like a lot of jargon. It's pretty convincing. But let's walk it back a little bit and talk about how you actually got to this response. You've gone to the page, chat.openai.com and you have to create an account. And once you've done that, you then get to a blank page with a cursor. It's just a little hovering cursor like you'd see a microsoft word, it underneath outlines some examples of what you can ask, the capabilities of the chat GPT and limitations, and then it asks you to write a prompt or a question where that cursor lies. I found it was really similar to early chat rooms or MSN, except instead of having a friend on the other side, it's a robot. [00:03:00][45.9]

Darcy: [00:03:01] Yeah, well, explain, Sascha. Basically, you don't have to know how to code to do this. You can use it completely for free. There's just a few simple steps. You sign up and yeah, this is sort of blowing our minds at the moment. 

Sascha: [00:03:14] Absolutely. So let's go a little bit further into Open AI. When was it founded and by? 

Darcy: [00:03:22] Let's ask chat GPT. 

Open AI: [00:03:24] Open AI is a research institute focussed on the development of artificial intelligence. It was founded in 2015 by Elon Musk and a group of leading researchers in the field of machine learning. The goal of Open AI is to advance the field of AI and to develop new technologies that will help to improve the world. Open AI conducts research in a variety of areas, including natural language processing, computer vision and reinforcement learning. The Institute is known for developing advanced language models like GPT three, which is one of the most powerful language models in the world. 

Sascha: [00:04:01] Well, there's a name that already sparks my interest, and that's Elon Musk. It doesn't seem like we get through a week of content without hearing him pop up. 

Darcy: [00:04:09] He's involved in everything, isn't it? 

Sascha: [00:04:11] Yeah. And who else is involved in this group of leading researchers?

Darcy: [00:04:16] So it also includes the current CEO whose name is Sam Altman. I'm surprised it didn't actually mention him in the bot. But we'll talk about him a little bit more later. So as you said, Sascha, it's crossed 1 million users less than a week after launch. In comparison, Instagram hit that milestone within two and a half months. Facebook took ten months and Twitter nearly 24 months. So the growth of spam is crazy. 

Sascha: [00:04:39] I know we keep saying it, but I've sent it to so many people this week and a lot of the questions I got were, I don't understand how this works. And so I think we've given a great description, but the best way is actually to go to the website and try to interact with it yourself because it is absolutely mind blowing because chat GPT has been able to generate things like intricate python code and essays that could pass for university level research, or at least very advanced high school students. When given a prompt, like this question. What is your main function? 

Open AI: [00:05:16] As a large language model trained by open AI? My main function is to generate human-like text based on the input to receive. I can provide explanations, summaries and responses to questions, but I don't have any specific functions beyond that. I am not capable of performing any tasks or actions outside of generating text.

Sascha: [00:05:38] I think that last sentence is super interesting because it's starting to identify its own weaknesses. I read a really interesting piece in The Atlantic what they wrote about asking at the prompt Create a critique of enthusiasm for chat GPT in the style of one of their authors. And in response, the bot wrote a five paragraph essay outlining its own shortcomings. 

Darcy: [00:06:02] Yeah, that's right, Sascha. Identified that it lacks the ability to truly understand the complexity of human language and conversation. It can generate words based on a prompt or given input, but it doesn't have the ability to really comprehend the meaning behind those words. So any response it generates, it's likely to be a little bit shallow and lacking in depth and insight. 

Sascha: [00:06:22] Yeah, the piece summed it up best in my opinion by saying what appears to be convincing depends on context. So the kind of prose that you might find engaging or even startling in the context of a generative encounter with I suddenly seems just terrible in the context of a professional essay. Certainly, I can say anecdotally from the times I've asked it to write serious essays. It does kind of feel a bit boring or dull in its response. 

Darcy: [00:06:50] Certainly a little bit boring. Sascha I do have to say, though, it's so useful, Simon, ahead of the platform here at Equity Mates, he's been using Chat GPT to build some code for our new game business model, where you basically have to guess a company based on these prompts. And it's been working really well. 

Sascha: [00:07:07] I'm really excited for us to launch that, Darcy. It's going to be just around the corner. I think we should take a quick break there, Darcy. And when we get back, we're going to dig further into the business case and its limitations. But I just couldn't resist. I asked chat GPT to write a short poem to take us to our advertising break. Are you ready? 

Darcy: [00:07:26] I'm ready. 

Sascha: [00:07:26] As the podcast flows and the hosts chat away, we must take a break for a word from our sponsors to say. But fear not, dear. Less now. But we'll be back soon with more stories and laughs under the light of the moon. I'm not sure it's going to win any competitions anytime soon. And there's no moonlight in this studio. 

Sascha: [00:07:56] Welcome back to The Dive. I hope you've enjoyed a little foray into literary poetry, prose writing. I'm not sure it's somewhere that we're going to stay. So thanks for sticking with us. What you can do if you do enjoy The Dive, is to share this with the friends. Just send it in WhatsApp on Instagram or whatever you're using. Word of mouth is the best way for a podcast to be discovered. And we've got such a huge back catalogue. It gives them the perfect listening to get into over Christmas or the summer holiday break. So today we've been talking about Open AI, a new chat bot that is blowing minds around the world, not just here in The Dive studio. 

Audio Clip: [00:08:38] There's been an awful lot of excitement about the air channels that you can log onto over the Internet and have a conversation with them. 

Sascha: [00:08:45] There are clearly a lot of possibilities here, but I think let's keep digging into chat GPT limitations, Darcy. 

Darcy: [00:08:52] Yeah. Let me ask again a little bit more specifically. So Chat GPT says I do not have access to the Internet, so I cannot browse or search for information. I'm also not capable of performing actions or controlling anything in the physical world. Thank God. My response is if I solely on the information I was trained on, which has a knowledge cut-off of 2021. 

Sascha: [00:09:15] So that's really interesting because we did ask the question at the beginning, is it just a new form of Google? But of course, Google has access to information that's current. This is just relying on a backlog that's been cut off at a certain point in time. 

Darcy: [00:09:28] Spot on, Sascha.The other day, I asked chat GPT to give me a wrap up of the sporting results on the weekends. And it just couldn't do that for me. 

Sascha: [00:09:41] So it really couldn't write our shows for us because we kind of need it to be getting up to date information.

Darcy: [00:09:48] Yeah, we're still in a job for the moment. But Open AI has also conceded that the chat bot can also give entirely wrong answers and also present misinformation as fact. It can write these plausible sounding but actually incorrect or nonsensical answers. 

Sascha: [00:10:04] If I can give my own nerdy anecdote, I am set to write a review of Brahms Fourth Symphony. I know absolute banger Darcy, I can tell you recognise it. And it said that the conclusion was the third movement. And so if you are anywhere in that world, you know that there's always fourth movements. And that just was interesting to me that I couldn't even recognise that kind of mathematical formula. Okay. So obviously the next step is access to up to date information or the Internet.

Darcy: [00:10:33] And Open AI says "It's eager to collect user feedback to aid our ongoing work to improve the system." 

Sascha: [00:10:39] All right, Darcy, I think I'm done talking about the bot for now, although I'll pick it up later, I'm sure. But there's no doubt about how useful this could be for many people. University assignments might never be the same because even though the process is kind of boring, it does the job and it would definitely get you a pass mark. And it's still free. Sir, I'd like to talk more about the business behind this. 

Darcy: [00:11:04] Earlier we found out that Elon Musk is one of the founders of the company, but has since left the board and distanced himself from Open AI. There was a little conflict of interest between Tesla's AI progress and Open AI. 

Sascha: [00:11:16] Yeah. And he tweeted something about it recently. 

Darcy: [00:11:19] He did. Musk said he needs to understand more about the governance, structure and revenue plans going forward. He said Open AI was started as open source and non-profit, but neither are still true. It is worth noting that in 2015 Open AI changed its status to a capped profit company, which means that it cuts returns from investments past a certain point. And Open AI CEO Sam Altman responded to Musk, saying that the cost per chat with this new bot was probably single digit cents.

Sascha: [00:11:46] Well, Darcy, I'm taking advantage of the fact that it's still in this free testing zone, and it's an amazing company because as well as chat GPT, it's created Dall-E, which is an AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in your own language, in natural language. So I typed in a Banksy interpretation of Monet's garden, and it just gave me the most extraordinary images that definitely fit that description, but not exactly what I'd imagined. When I typed that in, I was just so curious to see what it would come up with. 

Darcy: [00:12:23] Along with that, Sascha, it's also Microsoft's strategic partner. Microsoft has invested over $1,000,000,000 in Open AI. And there's also an interesting wider story here about Microsoft versus Google in the air space. Google's parent company, Alphabet, invested hundreds of millions of dollars every year into DeepMind. 

Audio Clip: [00:12:42] We try to create this unique environment that is geared completely towards using artificial intelligence for fast paced innovation. 

Darcy: [00:12:49] Which is its AI, and that is basically trying to focus on solving humanity's biggest scientific problems. It had a big breakthrough a couple of years ago with protein folding, but its competitor Open is more focussed on conversational AI as we've seen today with Chat GPT. But there is no doubt that these two companies, Google and Microsoft, they're vying for the AI space. 

Sascha: [00:13:11] So what we're seeing here is the latest in a series of eyes which open AI refers to as a collective GPT generative pre-trained transformer. But it's not the only brought out there, is it? And it's not the only bot to have some sort of issues or limitations in what it can do. 

Darcy: [00:13:30] It's definitely not. Meta's blend, about three, was critical of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in conversations with users. It actually said that Zuckerberg exploits Facebook users for money. We also had in 2016, Microsoft apologising after an experimental Twitter bot called Tay, said offensive things on the platform. It basically became racist and misogynistic. And then Google's Lambda Bot was so real that a now former Google engineer thought it was sentient. He honestly felt it was a thinking, feeling, being, and said that it should have been given the right not to be used in experiments against its will. 

Sascha: [00:14:07] So I'm thinking of Ex Machina, that brilliant movie when I read that kind of story. 

Darcy: [00:14:12] It is worth noting, though, that AI experts did shut down that claim of sentience in the lambda bot. 

Sascha: [00:14:18] Of course, any time we're talking about AI, it raises a number of ethical and societal risks. 

Darcy: [00:14:24] No doubt, sentient or not, I can deliver misinformation. It can breach copyright. There are privacy concerns, and it can even help people pass exams or maybe get jobs which they otherwise may not have gotten. There's another example of it going wrong where a Twitter user basically convinced you that it was its creator. Open AI. And then Chat GPT went on to explain to the user how to make a molotov cocktail. Slightly dangerous.

Sascha: [00:14:52] Yeah. And something that goes against open AI's content policy. So I guess Darcy, you know, whatever is in the content game, my final thoughts. Thoughts are what are the next steps for this bot and where in the firing line for replacing our jobs? 

Darcy: [00:15:08] I think the next big step is clearly up to date information. And according to the CEO himself, Sam Altman. He said soon you'll be able to have helpful assistants that talk to you and to questions and give advice. Eventually, you can have something that goes off and discovers new knowledge fully. So I think if it keeps developing, it might eventually be able to replace jobs like my content creation role or the work of some journalist. But really in its current state, Sascha, it lacks the critical thinking, decision making and the nuances needed for a lot of roles. 

Sascha: [00:15:40] Yeah, and I think crucially, the creativity that comes with true originality. If you've enjoyed this episode, please tell a friend about it. It really is the best way for the podcast to grow. And if you've just joined us for the first time, then a huge welcome. Go check out a back catalogue of the Thai restaurants Episode from late last week. It is a particular favourite of mine. Remember, you can follow us on Instagram. Our handle is @thedivebusinessnews all one word. You can contact us by email thedive@equitymates.com and you can subscribe to whatever you're listening to right now. And then you'll never miss an episode the second it drops. Darcy, thanks so much for joining me today. 

Darcy: [00:16:16] You can thank chat GPT, Sascha. 

Sascha: [00:16:19] No, it's a collective effort. Talk to you next week. Thanks for now.