Recently, ChatGPT and its ilk of ‘giant artificial intelligences’ (Bard, Chinchilla, PaLM, LaMDA, et al.), or gAIs, have been making several headlines.
ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM). This is a type of (transformer-based) neural network that is great at predicting the next word in a sequence of words. ChatGPT uses GPT4 – a model trained on a large amount of text on the internet, which its maker OpenAI could scrape and could justify as being safe and clean to train on. GPT4 has one trillion parameters now being applied in the service of, per the OpenAI website, ensuring the creation of “artificial general intelligence that serves all of humanity”.
Yet gAIs leave no room for democratic input: they are designed from the top-down, with the premise that the model will acquire the smaller details on its own. There are many use-cases intended for these systems, including legal services, teaching students, generating policy suggestions and even providing scientific insights. gAIs are thus intended to be a tool that automates what has so far been assumed to be impossible to automate: knowledge-work.
