AI: ChatGPT of the Past, Present & Future

With an every increasing number of new headlines popping up regarding the topic of advancements in Artificial Intelligence recently, I decided to write an article myself covering the concepts of ChatGPT and its advancements for my William & Mary Online MBA course.

What is ChatGPT?

In very simple terms, ChatGPT is a long-form question-answering AI that was built by the private company OpenAI. To be a bit more specific technically, ChatGPT is a large language model model chatbot that was initially based on GPT-3.5, which is an autoregressive language model that was developed OpenAI in the year 2020. (Montti, 2023) At their very basis, large language models perform the task of predicting the next word in a series of words. (Montti, 2023)

Additionally, large language models require a large amount of training to ensure their accuracy in their predictions. These large language models are trained with massive amounts of data to ensure that they can accurately predict what would should come next in a sentence. While this is very useful for some applications, the part where large language models fall short is that they do not always exactly understand what is it that a human is asking of them. In the case of ChatGPT, it improves upon the existing GPT-3.5 large language model by incorporating Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback training. (Montti, 2023) This Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback Training serves as an additional layer of training that uses human feedback to grant ChatGPT the ability to follow directions and generate responses that are satisfactory to actual human beings. (Montti, 2023)

What is are the major differences between ChatGPT-3.5 and ChatGPT-4?

As of March 2023, OpenAI officially launched their updated ChatGPT-4 tool to their users. In layman's terms, ChatGPT-4 is considered to be about 10 times more advanced than its prior version, which was the ChatGPT-3.5 that I spoke about previously. While there are numerous advancements included in this update, the main points are that they enable the model to better understand context and distinguish nuance more easily, which results in responses that are more accurate and coherent. (Terrasi, 2023)

While there are great deal of improvements that come with the updated ChatGPT-4 over the older ChatGPT-3.5, one of the more notable ones is the improvements in linguistic finesse. With this, now ChatGPT-4 "recognize and respond sensitively to a user expressing sadness or frustration, making the interaction feel more personal and genuine." (Terrasi, 2023) In addition, ChatGPT-4 has remediated the issues that ChatGPT-3.5 that had with dialects and "can accurately generate and interpret text in various dialects." (Terrasi, 2023) ChatGPT-4 also includes improvements in programming power as well. Compared to its predecessor, ChatGPT-4 has the "ability to generate code snippets or debug existing code more efficiently than GPT-3.5" (Terrasi, 2023) This will allow it to serve as a resource for software engineers in the future, as they will be able to receive assistance in debugging with plain English prompts. Lastly, there are numerous other advancements that ChatGPT-4 includes over ChatGPT-3.5, some of which include improvements in complex problem-solving, creativity & coherence, information synthesis, and reductions of biased or inappropriate responses. (Terrasi, 2023)

What is the future impact of such changes?

With such advancements being seen in the realm of Artificial Intelligence, it is natural to wonder if this will have some affect on the workforce as it exists today. Looking further throughout the news, we can actually see the real-world impact that the advancements in artificial intelligence are having. Most recently, two major brands, IBM and BuzzFeed News, have publicly announced their intentions to replace a portion of their workforces with AI-based solutions instead. In the case of BuzzFeed News, the company reduced its staff by 12% just prior to making its announcement that content creation would be driven by artificial intelligence in the future. (Mastrangelo, 2023) In the case of IBM, the company stated that it planned pause its hiring efforts for about 7,800 positions that could be replaced by artificial intelligence systems over time. (Edwards, 2023) With these announcements coming so close to the announcements of large advancements in the space of artificial intelligence, it is important to remember the far-reaching affects that such advancements can have.

References:

Montti, R. (2023, January 14). What is CHATGPT and how can you use it?. Search Engine Journal. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/what-is-chatgpt/473664/#close

Terrasi, V. (2023, March 22). GPT-4: How is it different from GPT-3.5?. Search Engine Journal. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/gpt-4-vs-gpt-3-5/482463/#close

Edwards, B. (2023, May 2). IBM plans to replace 7,800 jobs with AI over time, pauses hiring certain positions. Ars Technica. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/ibm-pauses-hiring-around-7800-roles-that-could-be-replaced-by-ai/

Mastrangelo, D. (2023, January 26). BuzzFeed to use AI to produce select content. The Hill. https://thehill.com/homenews/3832000-buzzfeed-to-use-ai-to-produce-select-content/