Per reporter: Zheng Yuhang Per editor: Lan Suying
UBS, a multinational financial services company, recently released a research report showing that among the various technologies, it took only 2 months for the "popular fried chicken" ChatGPT to reach 100 million users worldwide, while the phone took 75 years and the popularity of mobile phones took 16 years.
As soon as the chatbot launched by OpenAI came out, it "exploded" the world and became a hot topic. Behind the explosion of ChatGPT is a surging wave of artificial intelligence.
At this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sat down in a conversation with Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Matt Murray about the company's AI business and how generative artificial intelligence tools (AIGC) like OpenAI's ChatGPT are revolutionizing the way we work.
In the 30-minute interview, Nadella's favor of ChatGPT was overflowing, and in his opinion, the development of artificial intelligence can be described as "exponential" at this stage.
"In at least 30 years in technology, this is a proliferation of technology that I have never seen, and I don't think it happened during the Industrial Revolution." Nadella emphasized. "Maybe this time, for knowledge workers, it's all about the Industrial Revolution."
On AIGC: "Comparable to the Industrial Revolution! ”
On December 30, 2022, local time, Andrei Karpathy, head of artificial intelligence at Tess and a key leader in developing autopilot, tweeted that 80% of the code he wrote was written by GitHub Copilot, and the accuracy rate was about 80%.
GitHub Copilot is an AI tool that helps developers write code, owned by Microsoft. Kalpathy said Copilot has dramatically accelerated its ability to write code, and it's hard to imagine the days of "writing code by hand" these days.
Image source: Twitter screenshot
In a conversation with Nadella during this year's World Economic Forum, Matt Murray, editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal, mentioned that in the next 7-8 years, interviews are expected to be replaced by some kind of artificial intelligence, and that interviews may be better done, when there will be no reporters on site, and instead machines will do all the work.
Nadella did not comment positively on this, but made his position clear with the above example. "They [Tesla engineers] say it's much more efficient, and arguably, this [software engineers] used to be considered the hardest knowledge job to automate." He said.
In addition, Nadella cited seeing people in India talking to bots on WhatsApp in a vernacular Indian language and trying to get some government schemes. What the team did was train all the documents of the Indian government using GPT and make it accessible automatically in every Indian language.
"I've never seen in my life, at least in my 30 years in the tech industry, where advanced technology happening on the West Coast of the United States appears in a very real way to someone in rural India in a very real way in a matter of months." Nadella said bluntly. "This is a diffusion of technology that I've never seen before. I don't think it happened in the industrial revolution that happened, maybe this time, for knowledge workers, it's exactly the same as the industrial revolution, and it will help everyone. ”
Nadella's two examples, one of the most elite AI developers and the other of a farmer in rural India, are embracing AI, which is enough to show the power of AI in the world at work.
The recent ChatGPT has made more people feel the charm of artificial intelligence, especially AIGC.
ChatGPT is a chatbot based on the GPT-3 model, whether it is generating code, answering exam questions, or writing essays and novels. Although mathematical ability has been widely complained about by netizens before, on January 31, OpenAI officially announced that ChatGPT has undergone a major update that has improved accuracy and straightforwardness, as well as mathematical ability. Now, ChatGPT is not the ChatGPT that runs a train with its mouth full of math problems and is a serious nonsense.
The super learning ability and imagination ability made netizens call it incredible, and some journalists even sighed "is it about to lose your job".
Nadella has previously said that Microsoft products will be fully integrated into ChatGPT, including search alarm Bing and Office "family bucket." The "Daily Economic News" reporter noted that the new version of Bing integrated with ChatGPT-4 was briefly launched today.
The new version of Bing is described as "a research assistant, personal planner and creative partner by your side." The first major difference between it and traditional web search engines is the search box, which is not a search bar, but a chat box. It's much larger in size and encourages the use of natural language rather than keyword-driven search terms. You can ask Bing to look up a specific topic or idea, or even ask for its opinion, and it will respond to your question in a chat bubble.
Talk about ChatGPT: "Illusion" content is normal, design can be solved
UBS recently released a research report showing that among the various technologies, it took only 2 months for ChatGPT to reach 100 million users worldwide, while the phone took 75 years and the popularity of mobile phones took 16 years; Compared to the various apps, TikTok took 9 months to reach 100 million users, and Instagram took 30 months.
However, as things stand, it's too early to say that ChatGPT has reached the standard of "maturity" and does not achieve a viable monetization model. Some critics believe that ChatGPT may write malware and phishing emails. In addition, ChatGPT can also make false responses to text prompts, which the researchers call "hallucinations."
Dr. Steve Loki, a research fellow at the University of Queensland Business School. Steve Lockey stressed in an interview with the Daily Economic News that ChatGPT may be more likely than Google to produce "seemingly convincing" answers.
Loki said he had tried to use ChatGPT in academic settings, but ChatGPT was not good at providing informed facts. It even sometimes hints at plausible references — for example, ChatGPT will decently write the author on the answer it gives or appear in an academic journal, when in fact none of these (authors, journals, etc.) exist.
In response to this problem, Nadella believes that "this is not new to artificial intelligence, nor is it in any other category of software today." ”
He further explained that all current concerns about ChatGPT security, whether harmful content or "hallucinations," only need to be addressed by design. He also stressed that all software engineering must consider whether the model itself is safe or not, and then build a secure system on top of it.
Talking about models: exponential growth, "don't bet"
ChatGPT is the product of Microsoft's years of deep collaboration with OpenAI.
Back in 2019, Microsoft poured $1 billion into OpenAI, and according to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft is negotiating another $10 billion. Microsoft is already integrating the technology into its business, and Nadella announced this week that ChatGPT will soon be available on Microsoft's cloud computing service, Azure.
"The power of AI models is growing exponentially, not linearly." Nadella stressed during the dialogue.
Nadella believes that the current global economic stagnation and high inflation, the world needs something new (referring to artificial intelligence) to help us.
"If we really dream that there are more than 8 billion people in the world whose standard of living should be improved year by year, what is the investment to make that dream a reality? Artificial intelligence may be how we can achieve it. We need something that really changes the productivity curve so we can have real economic growth. He explained in the interview.
However, the popularity of ChatGPT has made many professionals feel a lot of pressure. Murray said in the interview that knowledge workers are already feeling anxious about the future of work. So, can AI really increase productivity for all of us, rather than replace many of us? Is the current society ready?
Nadella's answer to this question is that people need to use these tools to gain more influence in their work. As an individual, Nadella believes the best way to prepare for the menacing wave of AI is not to bet on the technology.
It is worth noting that on January 19, three days after Nadella's exclusive interview with the Wall Street Journal, according to Reuters, Microsoft announced that it would massively cut 10,000 jobs in the third quarter of fiscal 2023. According to reports, Microsoft's last large-scale layoffs was in July 2022, when it only laid off nearly 1,000 employees.
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