Directions and examples.....
MIT Technology Review
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
How AI experts are using GPT-4
Plus: Chinese tech giant Baidu just released its answer to ChatGPT.
By Melissa Heikkiläarchive page
March 21, 2023 STEPHANIE ARNETT/MITTR | GETTY
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.
WOW, last week was intense. Several leading AI companies had major product releases. Google said it was giving developers access to its AI language models, and AI startup Anthropic unveiled its AI assistant Claude. But one announcement outshined them all: OpenAI’s new multimodal large language model, GPT-4. My colleague William Douglas Heaven got an exclusive preview. Read about his initial impressions.
Unlike OpenAI’s viral hit ChatGPT, which is freely accessible to the general public, GPT-4 is currently accessible only to developers. It’s still early days for the tech, and it’ll take a while for it to feed through into new products and services. Still, people are already testing its capabilities out in the open. Here are my top picks of the fun ways they’re doing that.
Hustling
In an example that went viral on Twitter, Jackson Greathouse Fall, a brand designer, asked GPT-4 to make as much money as possible with an initial budget of $100. Fall said he acted as a “human liaison” and bought anything the computer program told him to.
GPT-4 suggested he set up an affiliate marketing site to make money by promoting links to other products (in this instance, eco-friendly ones). Fall then asked GPT-4 to come up with prompts that would allow him to create a logo using OpenAI image-generating AI system DALL-E 2. Fall also asked GPT-4 to generate content and allocate money for social media advertising.
The stunt attracted lots of attention from people on social media wanting to invest in his GPT-4-inspired marketing business, and Fall ended up with $1,378.84 cash on hand. This is obviously a publicity stunt, but it’s also a cool example of how the AI system can be used to help people come up with ideas.
Productivity
Big tech companies really want you to use AI at work. This is probably the way most people will experience and play around with the new technology. Microsoft wants you to use GPT-4 in its Office suite to summarize documents and help with PowerPoint presentations—just as we predicted in January, which already seems like eons ago.
Not so coincidentally, Google announced it will embed similar AI tech in its office products, including Google Docs and Gmail. That will help people draft emails, proofread texts, and generate images for presentations.
Health care
I spoke with Nikhil Buduma and Mike Ng, the cofounders of Ambience Health, which is funded by OpenAI. The startup uses GPT-4 to generate medical documentation based on provider-patient conversations. Their pitch is that it will alleviate doctors’ workloads by removing tedious bits of the job, such as data entry.
Buduma says GPT-4 is much better at following instructions than its predecessors. But it’s still unclear how well it will fare in a domain like health care, where accuracy really matters. OpenAI says it has improved some of the flaws that AI language models are known to have, but GPT-4 is still not completely free of them. It makes stuff up and presents falsehoods confidently as facts. It’s still biased. That’s why the only way to deploy these models safely is to make sure human experts are steering them and correcting their mistakes, says Ng.
Writing code
Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton University, saysit took him less than 10 minutes to get GPT-4 to generate code that converts URLs to citations.
Narayanan says he’s been testing AI tools for text generation, image generation, and code generation, and that he finds code generation to be the most useful application. “I think the benefit of LLM [large language model] code generation is both time saved and psychological,” he tweeted.
In a demo, OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman used GPT-4 to create a website based on a very simple image of a design he drew on a napkin. As Narayanan points out, this is exactly where the power of these AI systems lies: automating mundane, low-stakes, yet time-consuming task... '
