What has changed in recent A.I. advancements that made it leap forward so much lately?

Question

With chatGPT and A.I. generated art and so on, it seems like A.I. is really getting some traction. What has changed that we couldn’t do that before?

In: Technology

Answer 1

There’s nothing *particularly* novel about this batch of “AI”. It’s still a lot like the things people used to write for Twitter bots for fun a few years ago. The only difference is those were generally trained on a few hundred pages worth of data and the ones we’re looking at now are being trained on a few million pages of data, including and especially copyrighted data they have no legal right to use.

This kind of algorithm is really good at producing facsimiles of things it’s seen, so the more you let it see the better it gets. The old ones couldn’t “answer like my grandma” because it was very very unlikely they had been trained to know what that even meant. The new ones have.

Part of why it’s so hyped is the same reason NFT was so hyped: someone spent a lot of money to do this and they want to make that money back, but since it’s not particularly novel it’s not solving any new problems but they need to create the illusion it does. It still provides unsatisfying customer service, can still make errors in legal briefs that get lawyers disbarred, and cheerfully advises people to unalive themselves when it’s put in charge of hotlines for people with eating disorders.

Part of why that’s gaining traction is for companies who aren’t afraid of customers leaving because they have no choice (like healthcare, cable companies, insurance providers, etc.) it costs basically $0 to move your bad customer service to AI and that’s a lot of money saved vs. call centers. And big movie studios are chomping at the bit at the idea that they could use a computer to generate an entire movie from script to filming and owe nobody royalties. We didn’t really have the infrastructure to train on big data sets before, but now that we do we can automate those things people hate doing like singing or playing music or writing stories and they’ll have more time to do the things humans like such as working in a factory or moving boxes in a warehouse.