A UK newspaper reported that worries are growing in Silicon Valley that ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that is taking the world by storm, may replace Google as the world’s primary search engine.
Google execs are said to have declared a ‘code red’ over fears its $150-billion-a-year search business monopoly could be wiped out thanks to the Microsoft-backed tool. The claim that ChatGPT can write emails and resumes and other eerily human-like professional tasks has received a lot of attention. However, worries about big tech stem from the fact that it can immediately converse with users and provide answers by using data compiled from the internet.
That’s a worry for search engines that rely on users scrolling and researching themselves, exposing them to advertisements. However, experts have noted that ChatGPT appears to have a liberal bias and its answers are not entirely transparent, which raises doubts about its effectiveness as a search tool.
OpenAI invented ChatGPT, a startup co-founded by billionaire and Twitter CEO Elon Musk and is headquartered in San Francisco. A system prototype went online on November 30, 2022, and quickly climbed the popularity ladder, garnishing over one million users in its first week. ChatGPT uses a machine-learning technique called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).
This means it learns through interactions with its environment. It has been fine-tuned using supervised and reinforcement learning – which uses feedback to teach the system what responses are desired. Proper results draw positive feedback, while incorrect answers or behavior will cause negative feedback.
On its website, OpenAI explains that its agent is free to behave arbitrarily. By identifying the reward function that best explains the human’s decisions, the AI gradually creates a model of the task’s objective. It then uses RL to learn how to achieve that goal, according to OpenAI.
As its behavior develops, it keeps seeking human input on trajectory pairs where it is most unsure of which is preferable and further develops its comprehension of the objective.
ChatGPT can also produce text that resembles what people would write thanks to the enormous corpus of internet text from which it learned. The chatbot’s ability to converse is one of its key advantages. It can recognize message context and react appropriately.
This makes it well-suited for language understanding and dialogue generation tasks. The model can generate high-quality text and human-like responses, making it suitable for a variety of industries, such as customer service, finance, and healthcare.
Additionally, ChatGPT can be fine-tuned on a specific task or dataset, making it highly adaptable for different use cases. This ability provides AI with various applications, such as language translation, text summarization, and question answering.
The version of the bot available for public testing attempts to understand questions posed by users and responds with in-depth answers resembling human-written text in a conversational format.
It is available on a desktop for free, just like Google’s search, but it provides information in a completely different manner. Users first have to verify they are not a bot by entering their name and mobile number.
The AI will then respond to any question, though depending on how much training it has had in a given area, some responses will be more in-depth than others. In a split second, ChatGPT can respond to a variety of queries.
It might seem like another person is speaking on the other end due to the human-like responses to questions.
Experts say a tool like ChatGPT could be used in real-world applications such as digital marketing, online content creation, answering customer service queries, or, as some users have found, even to help debug code.
It has been used to pass exams, deliver sermons, write love and apology letters, code software, and give relationship advice, to name just a handful of its functions. Some companies have used the platform to create emails and sales campaigns.
Marketing professionals think its application could be expanded, assisting in addressing frequently asked customer questions and offering fundamental customer support. The healthcare industry is enthusiastic about its potential as well. Some have hypothesized that it might assist in advising patients on how to proceed and addressing their concerns about symptoms.
Given the lack of doctors in both the US and the UK, the tool might provide patients with basic care quickly while freeing up doctors for more important tasks. Additionally, it has been listed as a “co-author” on more than 200 Amazon books.
