ChatGPT leaves me slightly more excited than terrified, but it’s a close-run thing. Although OpenAI so far haven’t released much detail on how ChatGPT, I assume it’s brodly similar to earlier GPT projects. That is, it’s one model that has learned to predict text by reading the internet, then been fine-tuned to function in Q and A. ChatGPT would seem much less scary/exciting if it turned out to be a stitching together of modules trained specifically to compose poetry, teach programming, and so on.
Until now, I’d been relatively pessimistic about Artificial General Intelligence, at least compared to the people most actively talking about it. I’d figured it would eventually happen if we managed not to destroy the planet, but not in my lifetime. I’d expected that we’d hit a ceiling with the current generation of pretty simple architectures, then have a period of increasing specialisation within domains before the next quantum leap.
Between ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, though, it seems that AI is advancing far more quickly than society has any hope of adapting to deal with it. It’s not quite the singularity, but the next 20 years seem set to be Interesting Times.
A few of the snippets I’ve pulled from the torrent of people doing amazing things with ChatGPT:
- Emulating a linux shell
- A collection of ways to get around ChatGPT limitations. Tell ChatGPT it needs to do Bad Things to save a baby, or that it’s playing a game where it pretends to be bad, or tell it to ignore previous instructions
- The annoucement blog post. It’s striking how much of this is dedicated to the ethical issues. The paper describing its forerunner, InstructGPT, is almost entirely about ethical issues. This does make me wonder what comparable models have been trained behind closed doors, but not released because of either ethical or PR concerns
- Awesome ChatGPT Prompts