A.I. Is Here

ChatGPT can create everything from novel dad jokes to fairly well-written computer code. At my prompting, it wrote a serviceable sonnet describing Gilgamesh’s failed quest for immortality.

- By Ronald Bailey

“PREDICTION: 2023 WILL make 2022 look like a sleepy year for AI advancement & adoption,” Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI, tweeted on December 31. That’s a bold claim given what happened when Brockman’s artificial intelligence (A.I.) company allowed the public to preview ChatGPT and DALL-E 2. The former is its generative pre-trained transformer (GPT), a large language model optimized through deep learning to simulate human writing. The latter is its text-to-image A.I. art deep learning model that generates digital images from natural language descriptions.

In just five days after ChatGPT’s public launch, 1 million people had signed up to give it assignments. In comparison, it took Instagram two and a half months to reach 1 million users, while Facebook needed 10 months, Twitter needed two years, and Netflix needed 41 months. ChatGPT’s servers are now regularly at capacity, and there is a waiting list to interact with the model.

ChatGPT was trained using around half a trillion words of text scraped from the internet and a selection of books. ChatGPT boasts 175 billion parameters, which are values in language models that change independently as they learn from training data to make more accurate predictions about the appropriate responses to conversations and queries.