ChatGPT sparks AI ‘gold rush’ in Silicon Valley

With ChatGPT, a leading artificial intelligence company, you may ask questions in normal language and receive conversational responses. The bot keeps track of the conversation’s flow and bases its subsequent responses on past queries and answers. Its responses are obtained from a vast amount of online data.

Its responses sometimes come out as quite authoritative. More than a million people are testing out ChatGPT a few days after its introduction.

Be cautious though, as ChatGPT’s developer, the for-profit research facility known as OpenAI, cautions that it “may occasionally generate false or misleading information.” Here’s all about ChatGPT:

What is ChatGPT?

OpenAI published ChatGPT, an AI chatbot system, in November to demonstrate and test the capabilities of a very big, powerful AI system. You can ask it any number of questions, and you’ll almost always get a helpful response.

You may, for instance, ask it to explain Newton’s laws of motion in an encyclopedia inquiry. You can ask it to create a poem for you and then instruct it to make it more entertaining.

The problem is that ChatGPT doesn’t really know anything. It is an AI that has been trained to identify patterns in significant amounts of text that has been taken from the internet and then further trained with the help of humans to provide more helpful, better dialogue. As OpenAI cautions, the answers you receive can seem logical and even authoritative, but they could also be completely incorrect.

Can a person chatting with a human and a machine distinguish between the two? That is the famous “Imitation Game” that computer scientist Alan Turing devised in 1950 as a means of determining intelligence.

However, chatbots come with a lot of baggage because businesses have tried, with varying degrees of success, to replace people with them in customer support roles. Over 70% of respondents in a study of 1,700 Americans sponsored by the startup Ujet said chatbots were a waste of time.