ChatGPT
I asked OpenAI's ChatGPT to write a funny poem in Bo Burnham style and this is what it came up with:
I'm a modern man, I've got a smartphone
I've got the internet, and I'm never alone
But sometimes I feel like I'm losing my mind
In this crazy world, where the truth is hard to find
I'm always scrolling, swiping left and right
Trying to keep up with the world's endless sights
But every time I open up my feed
I feel like I'm drowning in an endless sea
Of memes and videos, and posts so fake
It's hard to tell what's real and what's at stake
But still I keep scrolling, like a rat in a maze
Trying to find something that will truly amaze
But sometimes I wonder, what's the point of it all
In this world of screens, where we never truly fall
Is this really living, or just existing in space
With our heads down low, and a permanent case
Of smartphone addiction, and a fear of missing out
In this world of screens, where we can never truly doubt
But still I keep scrolling, like a never-ending loop
In this world of screens, where we never truly move.
The end.
Wow, this is truly amazing. I don't know what to say but we are surely living in exciting times. Bo Burnham never wrote this poem. You won't find it on the internet either. It's a totally new creation. Written by an AI. Literally an AI.
This AI is known as ChatGPT. It's a large language model that is optimized for dialogue. It was released just 5 days back and it has reached 1 million users. For context, it took Spotify about 5 months to reach a million users and about 2.5 months for Instagram to reach the same. So this leads to the obvious question: What's so great about ChatGPT?
For starters, it's best to understand what are Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMs are models that have been trained using very large dataset of human-generated text including books, articles, and other texts found by scraping the internet. This simply means that they are trained on huge amount of information on variety of topics.
To frame this argument quantitatively, GPT-3, upon which ChatGPT is built on, contains 175 billion machine learning parameters. This is huge when you compare it to the largest trained language model before GPT-3, Microsoft's Turing NLG Model, which had about 17 billion parameters. GPT-4 is in the making right now and it is rumoured to have about 100 trillion parameters. To make a basic comparison here, our brain has about 80–100 billion neurons (GPT-3 order's of magnitude) and around 100 trillion synapses. So it seems GPT-4 will have as many parameters as the brain has synapses.
What's truly special about ChatGPT is that it uses dialogue, in the sense that it works like a chatbot. This is really cool because now you have a full time access to a chatbot that gives mostly relevant and descriptive answers in real time who also happens to be an expert in almost all the topics. Imagine how much time it will help you save?
Here are few applications of how people are using it including me
I just debated with the bot over the existence of God and it was unbelievable. I would highly recommend you debate with it on whatever topic you like.
Debugging code: It not only explains the bugs but fixes it and also explains the fix. It's like stack overflow on steroids. Moreover, it can also assist you to write code by generating code scripts from text inputs.
Research on any topic including investment research. You can literally pass a prompt saying "Form a research thesis on the future of nuclear fusion" or something like "Write a crypto investment thesis". You can even ask it to summarize the thesis or elaborate a particular point in the thesis.
Some are also using it as a personal assistant to ask basic questions throughout the day.
It can also help you with creating a viable marketing campaign for your startup based on your specific needs.
Entertain you: For example, this poem above, or you can even pass some crazy prompt like "Write a conversation between Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in the style of a Quentin Tarantino movie."
It's also a great teacher. It can explain complex stuff super simply. You can ask "Explain the difference between capitalism and socialism in a simple way" or "Explain cloud computing like I am a 5 year old". Believe me I asked this last query and it gave me a very compelling answer with interesting analogy such that a child can actually understand.
This isn't the end product. The model will drastically improve over the coming years it will be scary good. This will create many new applications and many new multi-billion dollar companies. Who knows, in the not so distant future, we might just tell AI to do our taxes and it will do it, or even seek medical or legal advice. The potential here is unlimited. What we are witnessing here is the rise of a brand new computing platform.
It is also worth noting that the conventional wisdom, for most decades was that the AI would first impact physical labour, and then cognitive labour and then maybe someday it would do creative work. It now looks like it's going to go in the opposite order.
Before ending my blog, I want to comment on the above poem as to why I think it's truly amazing. First off, the AI, at many levels, seems to "understand" what a poem is? It understands that it should have a theme and should contain rhyming words, it also seems to understand the different types of figures of speech. For example it makes an interesting simile comparison in the line 'But still I keep scrolling, like a rat in a maze' and in the last eight lines it uses the concept of repetition where it goes on to repeat the line 'In this world of screens'.
Moreover, it also seems to understand (to a very minor degree though) what it means to be "funny". Obviously if Bo Burnham actually wrote a poem it would be way more funnier but it is important to note that "funny" has many levels to it. The model will obviously improve over the coming years. But the most important thing is that it can form relevant logical relations to "understand" what kind of art Bo Burnham creates. The poem may not necessarily be funny but it is hard to argue that it isn't in Bo Burnham style. What this means is that it can rightfully relate different concepts in highly sophisticated ways.
It's akin to a person who is inspired by Bo Burnham, who has religiously studied everything Burnham has ever created and now wants to use this inspiration to create something new and creative based off of Burnham's work.
Picasso said, "Good artists copy, great artists steal." Well, tell you what, this technology by OpenAI will create some of the greatest artists in the world.
P.S You can access ChatGPT here.