The latest tool to capture the imagination of the internet is a chatbot developed by OpenAI, a company linked to billionaire Elon Musk.

The San Francisco-based company made the chatbot available for public testing last week and has already seen over a million users interact with it.

Chatbots are software applications designed to mimic human-like conversation based on different prompts.

According to OpenAI, the ChatGPT model has been trained by a machine learning technique called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).

This should, in theory, make it scarily accurate at simulating dialogue through things like answering follow-up questions, admitting mistakes, challenging incorrect premises and rejecting inappropriate requests.

Initial development involved human AI trainers providing the model with conversations in which they played both sides – the user and an AI assistant.

As the program progressed, the company decided to release it to the public.

The version of the bot available for public testing attempts to understand questions posed by users and responds with in-depth answers resembling human-written text in a conversational format.

Naturally, it learns from each interaction in an attempt to get better.

How is Elon Musk involved?

OpenAI, a research and development firm, was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 by Silicon Valley investor Sam Altman and billionaire Elon Musk. 

It attracted funding from several others, including venture capitalist Peter Thiel. In 2019, the group created a related for-profit entity to take in outside investment.

Musk, who remains engulfed in his overhaul of social networking firm Twitter, left OpenAI’s board in 2018, but chimed in with his take on the viral phenomenon, calling it ‘scary good’.

ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI.

What can it be used for?

A tool like ChatGPT could be used in real-world applications such as digital marketing, online content creation, answering customer service queries or as some users have found, even to help debug code.

The bot can respond to a large range of questions while imitating human speaking styles.

Should we be worried about it?

As with many AI-driven innovations, ChatGPT does not come without misgivings. 

OpenAI has acknowledged the tool’s tendency to respond with ‘plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers,’ an issue it considers challenging to fix.

AI technology can also perpetuate societal biases like those around race, gender and culture. Tech giants including Google and Amazon have previously acknowledged that some of their projects that experimented with AI were ‘ethically dicey’ and had limitations.

Not surprising, as I just learned that OpenAI had access to Twitter database for training. I put that on pause for now.

Need to understand more about governance structure & revenue plans going forward.

OpenAI was started as open-source & non-profit. Neither are still true.

Despite these concerns, AI research remains attractive. Venture capital investment in AI development and operations companies rose last year to nearly $13 billion and more and more mainstream users are signing up to have a go with the platform.

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