I asked ChatGPT.

Elon Musk and Sam Altman founded a nonprofit artificial intelligence organization called OpenAI back in 2015. OpenAI was created as a philanthropic goal for humanity by a non-profit corporation, but it was unable to bear the costs of developers' salaries and equipment. It costs a lot of money to develop cutting-edge technology. OpenAI later changed its structure to a hybrid organization (a for-profit company with a non-profit "OpenAI LP" arm) in late 2019. OpenAI received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. Through this investment, Microsoft was able to acquire a license from OpenAI, and through this investment, Microsoft and OpenAI became close partners at a fast pace.

OpenAI developed its A.I. model GPT based on super-large data. When you hear about the training of such a massive amount of data, you would think that it requires a huge computer and a dinosaur-sized cloud. In May 2020, Microsoft announced that it would create a supercomputer specifically built for training OpenAI's giant A.I. model GPT-3, and use its own cloud service, Azure. But nothing in this world is free, so the next step is obvious. OpenAI has granted Microsoft an exclusive license for GPT-3.

Currently Google is dominating search engine market share. Microsoft’s Bing doesn’t even come close. Google is an aggregator of relevant web sites. It searches the internet for relevant sites based on your search terms. You still need to visit these sites, aggregate and analyze information itself.

ChatGPT on the other hand does everything for you. You basically ask whatever you need, and it spits the answer back to you. You don’t need to open any links, you don’t need to visit any web sites, you don’t need to collect any information. It is all done for you. Ultimately, people choose systems that allow them to find information more conveniently and quickly, and methods that are cumbersome will eventually be discarded. Google primarily generates ad revenue by inducing people to click on links that include advertisements. If ChatGPT is proved to be a better alternative that skips the search process, it could threaten Google's ad revenue. According to Bloomberg, this revenue from search ads amounts to around $280 billion, which is 81% of Google's Alphabet's revenue. In other words, the majority of Google's revenue comes from its search engine links. 

If super-large conversational A.I. is activated in 2-3 years, how will they make money? Now, let's talk about how big tech companies will utilize this AI model. Imagine a world where AI serves as your counselor, therapist, or consultant. You are suffering from depression and you decided to talk to ChatGPT. ChatGPT will ask you a series of questions to diagnose your problems. Then it suggests a specific exercise equipment or introduces related books as a solution. If it were possible to accurately identify people's preferences and needs, it would be game-changing. It would allow for highly targeted and personalized advertising, which would likely lead to increased engagement and conversions. 

Humans are already making countermeasures.

GPTZero. This is a countermeasure tool that is also run on A.I. that is used to detect whether a text is written by an A.I. ChatGPT amassed over 1 million users in the first 5 days. GPTZero amassed over 7 million users in the first week. This tool is created for educators so they can check if any of their students' writings are generated by A.I. It uses perplexity (randomness) to score a piece of text. Texts with lower perplexities are more likely to be generated by language models. Human writings tend to have burstiness. Some human writings can have low perplexities, but there are bound to be spikes in perplexity as the human continues writing. Contrastingly, perplexity is uniformly distributed and constantly low for machine generated texts. Using this technology, search engines such as Google is going to know that texts are generated by A.I. and it will not want to organically push out that content.

Humans can choose to ban the use of A.I. technology. New York City Public Schools (the largest school district in the U.S.) banned ChatGPT in early January, due to concerns over cheating and that the tool doesn't help “build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills”. More and more schools have joined the banning as teachers are concerned about plagiarism.

Is banning the right way? It only works if it is banned everywhere for everyone. Then it’s an even level playing field. But that is not going to happen. There will be states and countries that embrace A.I. technology and teach their children how to use it. And the children that grew up learning how to use A.I. will crush the children who did not. You can't fight innovation. You can't do anything but watch and fall behind, whether it's cars, the internet, crypto, or artificial intelligence. Innovation will happen and it is very important that we embrace it.

It could only solve simple problems. It was basically a long list of if-then-else conditions that would spit out predefined answers at users requests. It was just there to replace repetitive jobs.

But then… something happened. In 2016, AlphaGo beated the shit out of Lee Sedol in the game of Go. Go is an ancient board game that originated in China more than 2,500 years ago. It is considered to be one of the most complex and challenging games in the world. Due to the large number of intersections on the board and the freedom to place stones anywhere, the number of possible games is estimated to be around 2 x 10^170, which is far greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe. Many have speculated that A.I. could never calculate that many number of moves.

We thought A.I. was stupid. We thought it could only do repetitive tasks. It will never be as smart as humans. But we overlooked one aspect about A.I. The one advantage that could change the outcome of the war.

Speed.

It is able to consume and process vast amounts of information at an uncanny speed. It never eats, never sleeps, never needs a toilet break. It never tires or gets bored. It learns. It is always learning and evolving. And it learns about EVERYTHING.

A.I. is being trained in a variety of fields to perform a wide range of tasks. In healthcare, for example, A.I. is being used to assist with diagnostics, drug discovery, and patient monitoring. In finance, A.I. is being used to detect fraud, predict stock prices, and automate trading. In transportation, A.I. is being used to optimize routes, improve traffic flow, and develop autonomous vehicles. In manufacturing, A.I. is being used to improve quality control, predict maintenance needs, and optimize production processes. In agriculture, A.I. is being used to optimize crop yields, monitor animal health and improve precision farming. A.I. is also being used in the field of natural language processing, computer vision, Robotics, and many other fields where it can bring its ability to process large amounts of data quickly and accurately to bear.

Do we stand a chance against A.I.?

A.I. is nothing new but it was a shocking refresher when ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022, that we have to deal with A.I. one way or the other. You cannot ignore it, it is here to stay.

ChatGPT has taken the internet by a storm by having 1 million unique users within 5 days. Netflix took 41 months. Facebook took 10 months. Instagram took 2.5 months.

Not sure what ChatGPT is? Let’s ask ChatGPT what ChatGPT is.

Yea yea…. Blah blah blah… The best way to find out what it is by simply trying it. I have tried it too and it was downright scary. This resonates with most people thinking this tool is “dangerous”, “scary” or “too powerful”.

It writes an essay for you. It creates a summary for long articles. It creates and fixes code for you.

Yes, humans can do that too and they might do it better but ChatGPT did all of that in under 3 seconds, non-stop, without breaking a sweat.

I asked ChatGPT to write an article for me. I didn't like it. I asked to rewrite it using a different style. I still didn't like it. I asked again to rewrite using a different writing structure. I asked again to write a better conclusion. I asked again to include examples and references. I asked again and again and again...

The scariest part is that ChatGPT was still able to finish an article faster than I could ever do. After all, it only takes 3 seconds to write an article. You can ask it to re-write 10 times, it would only take 30 seconds. You can ask it to re-write 100 times, it is still faster than any human writer.

Is this the end for all humanity? Is A.I. going to take over our jobs? Is Skynet finally upon us? More importantly, is A.I. a friend or a foe? After all, it was created to make human lives better. Right? ... right??

How did we come to this? A.I. is a simple chat bot that can answer the most basic questions only. It would never understand the complexity involved in human speech, different context and the intentions behind it. Or so we thought.

Boy, did we create a monster?

P.S. The cover image was created by A.I.