ChatGpt, the future is already here

What is ChatGPT? “I am a language model, which means that my main function is to generate text in a coherent and fluent way in response to questions or clues,” explains the assistant, (assistant), as they like to call him.

ChatGPT, which was launched for free by the American company OpenAI on November 30, 2022, is a computer programming system or “chatbot” with a language based on artificial intelligence, that is, the creation and design of elements capable of thinking for themselves. human intelligence as a paradigm.

This app, which became a viral phenomenon days after its launch, uses GPT-3.5, a language model with more than 175 million parameters, which is trained with a huge sample of text downloaded from the Internet to answer real-world language-related questions. time.

What is it for?

Still in the testing phase and therefore with limitations, but it allows you to create any type of text, summaries, news articles, jokes, scripts or even create almost à la carte content and you can do it with the desired number of characters and with a response speed greater than the time required for formulating questions.

It enables conversation in multiple languages, is “coherent, takes into account what was previously said in the conversation and is able to identify topics that are better not discussed”, as verified.

OpenAI itself, the company that created it, in the founding of which the American billionaire Elon Musk participated, but later distanced himself, highlights the dialog format with which it works and the possibilities that this tool generates.

“The dialog format allows ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit mistakes, challenge incorrect premises and reject inappropriate requests,” the company explains.

How does it work

“I’m trained to use large amounts of human-written text.” “My goal is to imitate human language as precisely as possible,” says the assistant himself.

However, although it is trained to read millions of web pages, ChatGPT is not connected to the Internet and its “knowledge” expires in 2021, so it cannot currently respond to events that have occurred recently. It makes mistakes and cannot, for example, forecast the weather, nor learn from its mistakes, as human intelligence does.

However, if someone questions one of your wrong answers, the system admits its failure and tries to find a solution. It is the technicians who are currently working to fill this gap in developing training techniques and contributing more data.

An alternative to google?

Meanwhile, although its results are sometimes wrong or contradictory, there are already those who see ChatGPT as a fast alternative to Google search, and as a counterpart the Internet platform has already launched “Bard”, its new “chatbot”, also created by AI, as an obvious answer to that of its competitor.

That being so, and despite the news, questions and limitations, there is no doubt that the future is already here.

According to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, ChatGPT is for now an “early demo” of what will be possible to do with AI-based language interfaces.

“Soon you can have helpful assistants that talk to you, answer questions and give advice. Later you can have something go and do tasks for you. Eventually you can have something that reveals new knowledge to you,” Altman said on Twitter on the day of the assistant’s unveiling .

That “but”…

In January 2023, when the OpenAI “chatbot” was just launched, Mike Sharples, emeritus professor of educational technology at the Open University in the United Kingdom and a pioneer of the new chat system, defended the critical use of this tool in education, as he said, “it allows us to learn from the vast possibilities it offers us”, although at the same time he warned of the risks of the “democratization of plagiarism”, a new “challenge” for academic institutions from now on, in addition to the risk of students using this system to afford not to do their job.

In this sense, Sharples also pointed out that although this technology is “exceptionally capable of producing credible texts”, “it cannot have real-time information, it cannot think about what they have written, it has no explicit model of how the word works and it is immoral” , being “a language machine, not a reasoning system”.

This is the reason why the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, one of the main training centers for French political and administrative elites, announced the ban on ChatGPT in 2023, without any explicit mention in the written or oral works of its members. .

The same reaction came from schools across the United States, which quickly restricted use of the app out of fear that the software could undermine learning.

Despite everything, Professor Sharples himself predicted that the use of AI in the classroom will be similar to that of the first calculators or mobile phones, where the answer was “first to ignore them, then to reject them, to ban them and finally to try to adapt them”.