I had a most remarkable but unsettling experience last week. Craig Mundie, the former chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, was giving me a demonstration of GPT-4, the most advanced version of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI and launched in November. Craig was preparing to brief the board of my wife’s museum, Planet Word, of which he is a member, about the effect ChatGPT will have on words, language and innovation.
“You need to understand,” Craig warned me before he started his demo, “this is going to change everything about how we do everything. I think that it represents mankind’s greatest invention to date. It is qualitatively different — and it will be transformational.”
Large language modules like ChatGPT will steadily increase in their capabilities, Craig added, and take us “toward a form of artificial general intelligence,” delivering efficiencies in operations, ideas, discoveries and insights “that have never been attainable before across every domain.”
Then he did a demonstration. And I realized Craig’s words were an understatement.
Insightful article by @tomfriedman. “Are we ready? It’s not looking that way: We’re debating whether to ban books at the dawn of a technology that can summarize or answer questions about virtually every book for everyone everywhere in a second.” #GPT4 https://t.co/Z3APrDVrlJ
— Michael Y. Uohara, MD (@mikeuohara_md) March 22, 2023