A.I. : In the end the world becomes better. Or ends in a bang.

The SXSW congress started off with a real power lady: Priyanka Chopra Jonas.  Her words to “do better, at all costs” weren’t even cold as Greg Brockman, OpenAI president and cofounder, came with exactly the same message. 

Brockman, in a very open and sincere style acknowledged that OpenAI’s core chatbot ChatGPT-3 has generated both hype and criticism since its debut four months ago. It has lovers, and haters., and that polarization is difficult to handle for the team of Open.ai. Yet he believes that it holds a key for a better, more robust, more solid, more resilient, and augmented humanity. Even if people are afraid or against it now.

Drudge work

ChatGPT-3 has been praised for its potential to help with the “drudge work” of writing, coding, finding solutions, and organizing thoughts. However, it has also faced fierce and violent criticism for its potential to replace human workers in creative and administrative fields, in content creation, and in communication. It can help incite a quick and deep spread of misinformation. Some have even accused it of having a liberal political bias against certain sources of information.

ChatGPT is still a kid

Greg Brockman acknowledged that the company had made an early mistake (“slow in the uptake”) in building safeguards to prevent responses that could be deemed inflammatory, but says the system is still learning, and gets constantly corrected. “It is still learning, evolving, finding its’ way”.  Old cofounder Elon Musk recently announced his plans to build an “anti-woke” rival to ChatGPT. Things can become interesting.

Force for Good

Despite these controversies, Brockman remains convinced that AI will ultimately be a force for good and enable humans to focus on higher-level skills and tasks, that it will free time and energy away from mundane tasks. So that we as humans can concentrate and focus on more important matters.

As the systems are still young, thinking about safety and mitigate overreliance on these systems when they are not yet perfect is needed. Just as important as reflection on ethics and regulation.

Dodging the question when AI is going to be sentient, Brockman is convinced individuals, schools, students, organizations and companies will find specific use cases that can provide solutions, contrarian thinking, alternatives, value, and calculable ROI when implementing AI.