AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines or computer systems that are programmed to think like humans and mimic their actions. Similarly, ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is an online artificial intelligence chatbot that is trained to have human-like conversations and generate detailed responses to queries or questions. ChatGPT became a blockbuster and a global sensation when it was released in November 2022. According to web traffic data from similarweb.com, OpenAI’s ChatGPT surpassed one billion page visits in February 2023, cementing its position as the fastest-growing App in history. In contrast, it took TikTok about nine months after its global launch to reach 100 million users, while Instagram took more than two years. Users of ChatGPT span the world, with the United States having the highest number of users, accounting for 15.73% of the total. India is second with 7.10%. China is 20th with 16.58%, Nigeria is 24th with 12.24% while South Africa is 41st with 12.63%, as at March 14, 2023. OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT is currently valued at about $29 billion. Feedback and reactions from academics, global and business leaders to artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, is mixed.  The likes of Bill Gates agree that ChatGPT can free up time in workers lives by making employees more efficient. A research titled – ‘’Experimental Evidence on the Productivity Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence’’ – by two economics PhD candidates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) attests that using ChatGPT made white collar work swifter with no sacrifice in quality and then made it easier to “improve work quickly”. Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, recently revealed that the opening part of his speech was written by artificial intelligence software -ChatGPT. Lately, Bill Gates and the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, were reportedly grilled by AI ChatGPT during an interview. Similarly, the United States Department of Defense (DoD) enlisted ChatGPT to write a press release about a new task force exploiting novel ways to forestall the threat of unmanned aerial systems. On the flip side, Elon Musk, is of the opinion that ‘’artificial intelligence is the real existential risk to humankind’‘. According to Musk,  ”artificial intelligence will outsmart humanity and overtake human civilization in less than five years’’. Theoretical physicist and one of Britain’s pre-eminent scientists, Professor Stephen Hawking, seem to agree with Elon Musk. He warned in in 2014 that artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. In the words of Hawking, “Once humans develop artificial intelligence it would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate’’. He went further to asset that, ‘’Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded’’. Cybersecurity experts from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a branch of the United Kingdom’s Spy agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), says artificially intelligent chatbots like ChatGPT pose a security threat because sensitive queries, including potentially user-identifiable information could be hacked or leaked. Underlying Principle And Modus Operandi of ChatGPT ChatGPT is essentially a large language model (LLM). A large language model, or LLM, is essentially a deep learning algorithm that can recognize, summarize, translate, predict, and generate text and other content based on knowledge gained from massive datasets. On March 14, 2023, OpenAI officially announced the launch of the large multimodal model GPT-4. A major difference between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 is that while GPT-3.5 is a text-to-text model, GPT-4 is more of a data-to-text model. Additionally, GPT-3.5 is limited to about 3,000-word responses, while GPT-4 can generate responses of more than 25,000 words and is more multilingual. GPT-4 is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content than its predecessor and scores 40% higher on certain tests of factuality. GPT-4 is also more multilingual and will let developers decide their AI’s style of tone and verbosity. Basically, Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained with massive amounts of data to accurately predict what word comes next in a sentence. To give an idea, ChatGPT model is said to have been trained using databases from the internet that included a massive 570GB of data sourced from books, Wikipedia, research articles, web texts, websites, other forms of content and writing on the internet. Approximately 300 billion words were reportedly fed into the system. This is equivalent to roughly 164,129 times the number of words in the entire Lord of the Rings series (including The Hobbit). Currently, ChatGPT has very limited knowledge of the world after 2021 hence is inept at answering questions about recent or real-time events. In addition to English language, ChatGPT understands 95 other languages spoken around the world including French, Spanish, German, and Chinese. Unfortunately, ChatGPT does not currently recognize any Nigerian local language. ChatGPT uses speech and text-t-speech technologies which means you can talk to it through your microphone and hear its responses with a voice. It is important to note that the ChatGPT model can become overwhelmed, generate incorrect information, repetitions or unusual combinations of words and phrases. This is because ‘’Large language models like ChatGPT are trained to generate text that is fluent and coherent, but they may not always be able to generate responses that are as nuanced or creative as those written by a human. A blog post by Dr. David Wilkinson, a lecturer at Oxford university and editor-in-chief of The Oxford Review, purports that ChatGPT appears to be making up academic references. In essence, Wilkinson counsels that just because it’s coming out of ChatGPT doesn’t mean it’s right. ‘’You need to be very careful about what you’re doing, particularly in academic circumstances, but also professional’’. How AI-Powered ChatGPT Sparked A Chatbot Arms Race After ChatGPT went viral, major tech companies around the world started scrambling to deploy generative artificial Intelligence. Sequel to speculations that the release of ChatGPT could disrupt and upend the search engine business, Google reportedly triggered a “code red”, summoning founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page back to the company. Soon after, Google launched an