Chat GPT is Not Going to Eat the World

The best book to read about Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence is Hello, World, by Hannah Fry. There's lots of interesting stuff in there about the technology and what it can do, the dangers of relying too much on it, all that good stuff. But one of the best things in it are Fry's remarks on the nature of learning.

From a long diet of science fiction in the culture, we think of machine learning as being like human learning, with new dawns opening on every horizon. To quote a little Tennyson,

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;

Well. Not quite. Fry makes the point that machine learning is like dog learning. If you're good you get a biscuit, if you're bad you get a clout. Now. If you're trying to raise venture capital you need to give them more Tennyson and guff about the brave new world. But back in the office, everything goes back, as it must, to binary. 1: biscuit; 0: clout.

It's not hard to find amazing answers to questions in Chat GPT - as the scribbling community are finding out, to their short-term joy and long-term horror - but one of the many fascinating aspects of machine learning is that what's easy for a computer to do is difficult for a person, and vice versa.

All the breakthroughs of the modern world haven't come about because maths has been reinvented. The breakthroughs have come about because calculations that would have taken a team of workers a week to do can now be done in less than a second. Trying to work out the dot product of two five-by-five matrices with only pencil and paper is torturous. With a computer, it's a snap of the fingers.

So it is with Chat GPT. Chat GPT is, essentially, a super-duper search engine combined with some natural learning algorithms to join up the results. There is a huge amount of text in English online, and that feeds Chat GPT for both the answer to your question and how to express it. But go off the beaten path a little; ask it the difference between an airplane pilot and, from our Tennyson, a purple twilight pilot, and it coughs up a furball:

An airplane pilot is a person who operates an aircraft and is responsible for ensuring the safe and efficient completion of a flight. A "purple twilight pilot" is not a recognized term in the aviation industry and therefore its meaning is unclear.

Bad doggy! Bad! No biscuit for you! And the end of the world is put off for another few days, at least.