The rapid deployment of an increasingly “general” artificial intelligence (AI), endowed with human cognitive abilities and therefore likely to disrupt many professions, is seen as inevitable in Silicon Valley and arouses a fascination that goes beyond the voice calling to slow down.
“All these things were created by intelligence. But for the first time, we are able to create intelligence itself,” he continues. “It’s a double-edged sword, but if it works out, it can solve all the problems (…), like global warming.”
Like many other tech players, Siqi Chen is convinced that he is witnessing a historic paradigm shift. Especially since OpenAI’s presentation on Tuesday of GPT-4, a new, even more powerful version of the natural language model that powers ChatGPT, the generative AI interface used by millions of people for a few months to write essays, poems or even computer lines. code.
ChatGPT will be able to process not only text, but also images, and produce more complex content, such as legal complaints or video games.
On Thursday, Microsoft, the main investor in OpenAI, promised that “soon we couldn’t do without” generative AI-based assistants, capable of interacting with humans in their languages and performing all sorts of tasks, from the summary. from a meeting to the creation of a website or an advertising campaign.
These tools will free humans “from the monotony that stifles creativity” so they can reconnect with “the soul of their work,” said Jared Spataro, an executive with the IT group.
“I used GPT-4 to code 5 micro-features for a new product. A (very good) developer wanted $6000 and two weeks. GPT-4 did it in 3 hours for $0.11. Awesome,” Joe Perkins, a British entrepreneur, tweeted.
Siqi Chen reckons that new technology could one day replace it. But it has the adaptability of humans, with solutions such as universal income. Beyond the threat to the intellectual and artistic professions, general AI is sparking insurmountable debates in society.
What will remain authentic, when the slightest photo on Instagram or the slightest opinion about a restaurant has been produced with or by an AI? What will become of learning, when it will be enough to make requests to the machines? Who should make the decisions to define the algorithms?
“This will raise existential questions for humanity. If it is more powerful and intelligent than us, are we exploiting it? Or is it exploiting us?” asks the former Stanford University researcher.
OpenAI claims to want to gradually build a general AI, with the aim of benefiting all humanity. It relies on the widespread use of its models to detect and correct problems. But the company itself seems overwhelmed by events.
Greg Brockman, one of the co-founders, admitted in an interview with The Information that ChatGPT was not as value-neutral as they would have liked.
Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientific officer, would like “there was a way to slow down the pace of release of these models with unprecedented capabilities,” according to an interview with MIT Technology Review.
And the start-up, whose name stands for “Open AI,” is criticized for its lack of transparency. The launch of GPT-4 marks “its transformation from a non-profit research laboratory into a capitalist company,” judge Will Douglas Heaven, an expert for this scientific journal.
But despite the real and imagined criticism, concerns, and risks, the industry remains convinced that conventional AI is coming, inexorably. Because the race is on between companies, explains Sharon Zhou, but also between countries, especially the United States and China.
“Power is in the hands of those who know how to build all this,” he says. “And we can’t stop, because we can’t afford to lose.”
Source: BFM TV
