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What About this ChatGPT thing?

Insights Category
Generative AI

AI systems like ChatGPT are quite powerful, and will become more pervasive over time. But how good are they right now?

OpenAI built ChatGPT with an ethical mindset. ChatGPT is not only ethical, but also upbeat and positive. Even though I was communicating with a non-human system, I enjoyed the positive response.

ChatGPT has a very good knowledge of history, science, literature, movies, and many other topics that facilitate human conversation. It was even knowledgeable about some of my favorite TV shows from the 1960s.

ChatGPT does not have a "gender identity." I specifically asked. ChatGPT pointed out many times that it was "an artificial intelligence language model developed by OpenAI, so I don't ..." For example, ChatGPT does not pretend to have feelings or emotions.

I pushed the limit of ChatGPT's knowledge by asking about π (pi). What is the 2000th decimal digit? ChatGPT thought the answer was "1," and repeated that even when I pointed out that it was incorrect. When it tried a third time, it incorrectly guessed "7." Since the digits of pi are well-known and readily available online, I found this odd. (But how many people would ask such a question...?) I guess we need to be careful about relying on anything the system says, even if it seems confident.

More to come in the future!