Hey, this ChatGPT thing sure is great, isn’t it?!?!

There’s only one problem…

What the heck is actually going on here?!?!

Yes, that seems to be the overall consensus (at least for now) about ChatGPT and all its wonders.

ChatGPT can do all kinds of things like write essays and take tests, write computer codes, heck, it can even write haikus.

But the technology has people worried because it can be a persuasive liar, believe it or not, and sometimes has a problem distinguishing the truth from falsehoods.

It’s highly advanced and can write whole paragraphs, but it doesn’t actually understand what it’s saying and only knows what words are likely to come next because it’s been trained on a dictionary and the Internet.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, was founded as a non-profit in 2015 to develop a “friendly” AI “that “benefits humanity as a whole”. OpenAI became a for-profit company in 2019.

The company and ChatGPT have become a hot-button issue lately because other companies and even the U.S. government have grown increasingly concerned about how the AI will continue to develop and the impacts it will have.

And there is worry in the ChatGPT process, as well. It appears that OpenAI is using feedback from more than a million users to filter out fake answers from ChatGPT instead of expensive training and reinforcement learning.

All of this is to say that there are still a lot of open questions about OpenAI and ChatGPT and what will come next.

As Toby Walsh said in an article on IFLScience, “We are now facing the prospect of a significant advance in AI using methods that are not described in the scientific literature and with datasets restricted to a company that appears to be open only in name.”

The future seems to be wide open for AI… we’ll just have to wait and see if that’s a good thing…