Artificial intelligence is an interesting technology for use in government and elsewhere. For years, AI was talked about theoretically, with a few examples surfacing here and there which were either extremely limited in their capabilities or optimized for very specific tasks, like business process automation or gaming. And then ChatGPT came along, and suddenly AI was in the mainstream, in the news, and on everyone’s mind.
A few other interesting things happened as well. Suddenly, all of those warnings by scientists and tech luminaries about the dangers of AI didn’t seem quite so theoretical when we could actually see a fairly advanced AI in action. I interviewed quite a few AI scientists about their concerns over the past few months since ChatGPT was released, and they seemed to make a good case about why AI is such a powerful technology that it needs to be designed and deployed in an ethical way, especially when working for governments or otherwise placed in positions of authority or power…
If you remember from my review of ChatGPT, I explained how the AI was trained by human users over time to help it tailor its responses for both accuracy and conversation flow. As such, it almost always sounds good, even if its answers are sometimes not always completely correct. But the biggest limitation with ChatGPT is that the scientists developing it cut off the data that they were feeding it around the end of 2021 into the early part of 2022. If you ask it about current events, like how the Ukraine War is going, it won’t know. And if you ask it about Joe Biden visiting Kiev, it will rightly tell you that he did so on November 22, 2014, when he was Vice President of the United States, but won’t know anything about his more recent visit as president. That means that while ChatGPT currently has one of the biggest user bases for apps in history, its usefulness will decline over time as we get farther away from the point where it stopped getting new data.
Enter The New Bing, which plugs ChatGPT into the internet, and pairs it with a search engine to boot. Theoretically, anyone will be able to try out the new AI and search engine combination one day, but for now, you have to join a waiting list, as Microsoft is only letting a few people in at a time. A bunch of my friends and I joined up as soon as it was announced and only one of us got in so far, so I don’t know how long you may have to wait. While you are waiting, Bing offers some sample questions on the signup page so that you can see how it works… Read the full article here.