A number of tech firms are working on the future of chatbots, an AI platform trained to engage in conversation, and one in particular has gone viral…
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Practitioners are surprised by how quickly these modern systems are developing, and some of them are starting to think we may have systems as smart as humans in as little as 10 years
ChatGPT could wipe out his job too.
Literally my line of work, you know, uh, apps, uh, design work, um, product design work.
Years ago, Sam Altman, Elon Musk and others pooled more than a billion dollars to research AI that benefits humanity. And then three years ago, Microsoft threw in another billion. Talking about AI… I realized like, this is a genie that once it’s out of the bottle, you’re never getting it back in.
That’s true.
For as long as I can remember AI was “just around the corner”.
The future was supposed to have robots that took over all menial tasks, replaced all manual labor and allowed us to sit back and do the important knowledge work that only humans could do.
But in reality it seems that Artificial Intelligence is better at replacing our knowledge work than our physical labor.
You can ask it any question and it will explain it, you can ask it to explain like you were a 5 year old.
You can ask it to explain it to you a certain style like a surfer or a cowboy in an old Western.
You can have it write essays, legal contracts, sales emails, song lyrics, translate languages.
You can ask to summarize books or videos or podcasts into bullet points.
It can write a cover letter and resume for you in 30 seconds flat.
It can create songs and lyrics in any music style or imitates any artist you want to name.
I can help you debug code…
And also just write code for you.
By typing in a prompt, it can help you create simple scripts that you can use to create plugins, apps and automate the things you do on the web.
All of this, without you needing any technical knowledge.
I asked ChatGPT to write a thousand word script for a documentary about the power of ChatGPT with some specific bullet points I wanted it to mention and it produced it flawlessly, including having parts for the narrator, a voiceover as well as some people that are being interviewed about how they use ChatGPT.
The important thing to understand is for a long time we had example of software we could interact with that could answer questions or follow commands.
Google Assistant, Alexa as well as some new home devices.
However, for the most part those were pre written commands.
If you ask Google what the weather is like, it triggers a function that was written by a human that handles that request.
This new breed of AI is a little bit different.
It draws on its knowledge to answer questions.
The answers are it’s own, in a sense that the people who designed it don’t necessarily even know what it’s going to say.
When you sign up they warn you a number of times “we don’t know WHAT this thing is gonna say. Don’t blame us.”
It learns from the massive amounts of data on the internet and with time and feedback it gets better and better.
Whatever it can do now, is just the starting point in it’s exponential learning curve.
And people are noticing. Fast.
Netflix took 41 months to reach 1 million users.
Facebook, it took 10 months.
For Instagram to reach one million users, it took 2 and a half months.
ChatGPT Reached a million users in 5 days.
There is a MASSIVE amount of people using it everyday and the number is growing rapidly.
The reason this is important is because the AI learns through human reinforcement.
Each time someone asks it a question, or prompts it, the AI is rewarded for giving satisfactory answers.
Over time and with millions and millions of people asking millions and millions of questions and commands, this AI will keep getting better and better.
Here are some ways in which ChatGPT will completely change the world, some of these applications are already live and some are rapidly being developed.
Keep in mind that this software has been only available to the public for a bit over a month.
1. Legal Work and Negotiation.
Already people are using ChatGPT to create legal forms, contracts, terms of service for their websites.
People have used it to successfully negotiate getting out of parking tickets, lowering their cable bills and sending scary sounding legal emails.
A company called DoNotPay is already using this tech to help people cancel subscriptions, reverse fees and help people sue companies that engage in predatory practices.
2. Education and mentoring
Education will be completely flipped upside down with this.
First, you can write any paper, essay and get answers to most homework assignments in seconds.
This AI has been tested on its ability to pass advanced exams in various fields and it’s capable of passing more of them than it should be able to.
On the flip side, it provides incredible tutoring potential, especially for kids that either have special learning needs or simply don’t have the resources to go to school.
ChatGPT can create coursework, lectures for the student to read and then answer any questions, explain any hard to grasp concepts.
It will go at whatever speed the student needs to learn at.
You won’t get bored if it goes to slow, and it will slow down and keep explaining a subject to you for whatever amount of time you want it to.
Right now it’s free, but it will likely have some fee later in the future, but the cost to provide this AI to a learning institution will be negligible.
Any kid with a laptop and internet connection anywhere in the world can have a world class tutor helping them.
Again keep in mind, this is out the box so to speak.
Let people train this AI for this specific task for a few years and it’s going to be much better.
Already we have technology that can create speech from text, we can have video that is generated with AI, so if it’s better for students to see a human likeness teaching it, we have that technology.
3. Business
This is where it gets really interesting but also kind of scary because of the sheer amount of people and business that it will make obsolete.
Chat bots can interact with your customers one on one, helping them to select the right product, answering their questions and pushing them to complete the sale in your webstore.
They can follow up with them to make sure they received the package and ask for reviews.
They can write all the content for emails and social media, product descriptions etc.
AI Automation consultants will be a very in demand industry for ecommerce owners
4. Coding
Right now the AI can spit out real, working code with just a prompt.
Now it’s not the same as coding up complex software all on it’s own, but this gives the ability for anyone regardless of tech background to start coding simple scripts.
This AI can also explain exactly what each piece of code does and what steps you would need to take, to make that into a Chrome Plugin for example.
This allows millions of people to start coding, start learning for free, in their spare time.
Without attending college, paying for classes or having to schedule meetings with tutors.
Do you have getting those email opt in pop ups on websites?
Take 5 minutes and create a plugin that will eliminate them
You will have learned a new skill and also stopped a lot of frustration.
This alone can take our coding literacy from only a few select people to a large portion of the population.
5. Any creative medium
We tend to think of people who create art and graphics and movies as being “the creatives”. They are people with natural talent for being creative, having a vision etc.
A different way of thinking about this is that they are adept at using whatever medium they produce in.
A person who paints beautifully spent a lot of time and effort to learn to do that.
A Movie director spent a lot of time working with cameras, movie sets, etc
But what percent of that is creativity vs just technical ability.
If everyone had the same exception technical ability to create images and graphic design, anything they could explain well enough to a computer
ChatGPT is also a potential death threat to Google.
Here’s an excerpt from The New York Times:
“Although ChatGPT still has plenty of room for improvement, its release led Google’s management to declare a “code red.”
For Google, this was akin to pulling the fire alarm.
Some fear the company may be approaching a moment that the biggest Silicon Valley outfits dread — the arrival of an enormous technological change that could upend the business.
For more than 20 years, the Google search engine has served as the world’s primary gateway to the internet.
But with a new kind of chat bot technology poised to reinvent or even replace traditional search engines, Google could face the first serious threat to its main search business.
One Google executive described the efforts as make or break for Google’s future.”
And I agree.
I asked ChatGPT to calculate my daily calorie needed to lose weight. I gave it my age, height etc.
It did that calculation while explaining very simply how that calculation was made.
Then I asked for a meal plan based on those calories, as well as a shopping list and some recipes.
It did that. In seconds.
With no ads, no pop ups, I didn’t have to read some fluffed up article.
It was just the info I needed and nothing else.
And it was specific for me.
As I was making notes for this video, I found myself, and this happened repeatedly…
I would open a new google search tab, stop myself…
And then go to ChatGPT and ask it the question I had.
Each time I would say ChatGPT served a much better experience than Google.
Out of the box, the experience is infinitely better.
Now it’s important to understand that these use cases I’m talking about will be minor compared to how this technology will fundamentally change our society.
We recently had a breakthrough in Fusion energy, which could mean cheap, abundant, safe energy. Which energy and computational power are potential limiting factors for the growth of AI.
If we have AI, energy and supercomputers, there are a lot of problems that can be solved if we just point it at the right problem.
For example with Genomics and genetic engineering, we know it’s theoretically possible to fix a lot of the health issues we have,
We can also design bacteria that can eat stuff we don’t want like waste plastics and we can make it produce things that we need like biofuels.
Genomic companies like Illumina are already using AI to have breakthroughs in the field.
The founder of OpenAI refuses to make any long term predictions because he says it’s impossible to predict the exponential growth we are about to experience.
But he is saying that you should be paying attention.
Here’s his recommendation:
And so if someone, kind of going back now to the, one of the first questions I asked, if you’re a student or a founder today, if you could just, if you were to point them in a single direction for how to prepare for this world, would you say go work for a company like OpenAI?
Would it be, um, just start doing some AI research or just start anything in the field? Like start building, come to open ai, whatever. Just like get, like, don’t, don’t miss out on this one. Like, just. Speed now would be my advice. However, do it. Yep. Makes, makes total sense.
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I think we are about to see incredible change occuring in a very short time period.
I plan to be building business and solutions in this field and contributing in whatever way I can, but whether you choose to dive in OR you just want to stay informed and not get left behind, stick with me.
The biggest mistakes I’ve made in the past with regards to business and investing was to not go all in on new tech that I knew in my gut was going to be big.
And I’m not going to make that mistake again.
And this feels like the biggest thing there ever was, potentially.
My name is Wes Roth, thank you for watching.