The use of artificial intelligence AI in emerging technologies continues to be a priority. San Francisco-based OpenAI has made its latest creation, the ChatGPT chatbot, available for public testing on November 30. A chatbot is a software application designed to mimic human-like conversations based on user prompts.
More than a million users tried to make the tool talk within a week of ChatGPT being unveiled, according to Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI.
In 2015, OpenAI, a research and development firm, was founded by Silicon Valley investor Sam Altman and billionaire Elon Musk and attracted funding from several other companies, including venture capitalist Peter Thiel. In the year 2019 the group created a related for-profit entity to take in outside investment.
Musk, who is still engulfed in his overhaul of social network firm Twitter, left OpenAI's board in 2018 but chimed in with his take on the viral phenomenon, calling it scary good, as he later tweeted that he was pausing OpenAI's access to Twitter's database after learning that the firm was using it to train the tool.
OpenAI states that their ChatGPT model, trained using a machine learning technique called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback RLHF, can simulate dialogue, answer follow-up questions, challenge incorrect premises and reject inappropriate requests.
The initial development involved human AI trainers who provided the model with conversations in which they played both sides of the user and an AI assistant. The bot version is available for public testing to understand questions posed by users and responds with in-depth answers that resemble human-written text in a conversational format.
ChatGPT could be used in real-world applications such as digital marketing, online content creation, customer service queries, and some users have found, even to help debug code.
The bot can respond to a wide range of questions while imitating human speaking styles.
As with many AI-driven innovations, ChatGPT does not come without any misgivings. OpenAI has acknowledged the tool's tendency to respond with plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers to an issue it considers challenging to fix.
AI technology can perpetuate societal biases like race, gender and culture. Tech giants, including Alphabet Inc., and Amazon.com, have acknowledged that some of their projects that experimented with AI were ethically dicey and had limitations. At several companies, humans had to step in and fix AI havoc.
AI research remains attractive despite these concerns. The data from PitchBook, a Seattle company tracking financings, shows that venture capital investment in AI development and operations companies rose to nearly $13 billion last year, and $6 billion had poured in through October this year.