Key idea: The main breakthrough of ChatGPT technology is its fluency — natural, human sounding — on virtually any topic. This is achieved by using groundbreaking Transformer neural networks developed and open-sourced by Google in 2017.
Original author and publication date: Barak Turovsky (Gig Insights) – March 9, 2023
Futurizonte Editor’s Note: If AI generates the future, then the future is no longer on our own hands.
From the article:
How do you view the technology incorporated in ChatGPT vs. what we’ve seen in the AI and LLM markets historically (e.g., how truly differentiated is this)?
The main breakthrough of ChatGPT technology is its fluency — natural, human sounding — on virtually any topic. This is achieved by using groundbreaking Transformer neural networks developed and open-sourced by Google in 2017. Transformer networks are a leap forward from older models that process sentences sequentially, grouping earlier words together even when the true meaning of a sentence depends on words that may occur later in a sentence. By contrast, Transformer models relationships among all words in a sentence at the same time —regardless of their position — resulting in more authentic-seeming outcomes. What’s more, Transformer neural networks are trained on a corpus of tens of billions of sample dialogues so they learn and synthesize information much more effectively than AI forbears.
What do you see as the nearest disruption opportunities for this technology? Much focus has been placed on search thus far, but is this the most applicable use case for LLM technology?
I believe that use cases aimed at improving creative and/or workplace productivity are much more practical for generative AI to achieve in the near to medium term, versus information-seeking, decision-support use cases like many search queries.
What does the future of the AI wars look like?
I prefer to call it the “AI Revolution.” This new incarnation of disruptive technology (many compare AI to the invention of electricity or fire) will impact every aspect of our lives.
I consider myself particularly lucky to have worked both on the first major AI breakthrough (using deep neural networks on a first-ever product at enormous scale with Google Translate) and on a new generation of AI that can produce natural, humanlike outputs for virtually any topic.
Currently, a lot of focus on the disruptive impact of ChatGPT is focused on search. However, given the utmost importance of accuracy, I believe it will take a long while for ChatGPT to disrupt how we search for information. But there are many use cases where fluency (natural-sounding communication) is at a premium.
