GPT-4: WHAT IT CAN DO TO WHAT IT AUGURS

1. Context 

2. What can GPT4 do

• GPT4 is a remarkable improvement over its predecessor, GPT 3.5, which first powered ChatGPT.
• GPT4 is more conversational and creative. Its biggest innovation is that it can accept text and image input simultaneously, and consider both while drafting a reply.
• For example, if given an image of ingredients and asked the question, "What can we make from these?" GPT4 gives a list of dish suggestions and recipes.
• The model can purportedly understand human emotions, such as humorous pictures.
• Its ability to describe images is already benefiting the visually impaired.
• While GPT 3.5 could not deal with large prompts well, GPT4 can take into context up to 25, 000 words, an improvement of more than 8x.
• GPT4 was tested in several tests that were designed for humans and performed much better than average.
• For instance, in a simulated bar examination, it had the 90th percentile, whereas its predecessor scored in the bottom 10 per cent.
• GPT4 also sailed through advanced courses in environmental science, statistics, art history, biology and economics.
• However, GPT4 failed to do well in advanced English language and literature, scoring 40 per cent in both.
• Nevertheless, its performance in language comprehension surpasses other high-performing language models, in English and 25 other languages, including Punjabi, Marathi, Bengali, Urdu and Telugu.
• ChatGPT-generated text infiltrated school essays and college assignments almost instantly after its release;
• Its prowess now threatens examination systems as well.
• OpenAI has released preliminary data to show that GPT4 can do a lot of white-collar work, especially programming and writing jobs while leaving manufacturing or scientific jobs relatively untouched.
• Wider use of language models will have effects on economies and public policy.
• The advent of GPT4 upgrades the question from what it can do, to what it augurs.
• Microsoft Research (Microsoft has invested in OpenAI) mentioned observing sparks of artificial general intelligence a system that excels at several task types and can comprehend and combine concepts such as mathematical proof in the form of a Shakespearean play in GPT4.

• GPT4 is still prone to a lot of the flaws of its predecessor. Its output may not always be factually correct a trait Open AI has called "hallucination".
• While much better at cognising facts than GPT3.5, it may still introduce fictitious information subtly.
• Ironically, Open AI has not been transparent about the inner workings of GPT4.

• While secrecy for safety sounds like a plausible reason, OpenAI can subvert critical scrutiny of its model.
• GPT4 has been trained on data scraped from the Internet that contains several harmful biases and stereotypes.
• There is also an assumption that a large dataset is also a diverse dataset and faithfully representative of the world at large.
• This is not the case for the Internet, where people from economically developed countries, of young ages and with male voices are overrepresented.
• OpenAI's policy to fix these biases thus far has been to create another model to moderate the responses, since it finds curating the training set to be infeasible.
• Potential holes in this approach include the possibility that the moderator model is trained to detect only the biases we are aware of and mostly in the English language.
• This model may be ignorant of stereotypes prevalent in non-Western cultures, such as those rooted in caste.

4.  causes of AntiGPT

• It ignores its moderation rules, as shown by its makers, thus jailbreaking it. As such, there is vast potential for GPT4 to be misused as a propaganda and disinformation engine.
• OpenAI has said that it has worked extensively to make it safer to use, such as refusing to print objectionable results, but whether these efforts will keep GPT4 from becoming a student at "WhatsApp university" remains to be seen.
• The larger question here is about where the decision to not do the wrong thing should be born: in the machine's rules or the human mind.

5. A stochastic parrot

• GPT4 is a machine that predicts the next word in an unfinished sentence, based on probabilities it learned as it trained on large corpuses of text.
• Microsoft Research has maintained that GPT4 does understand what it is saying and that not all intelligence is a type of next-word prediction.
• Professor Bender and her peers highlighted the harm of large language models two years ago, citing both ethical concerns and environmental costs.
• They also specified an opportunity cost imposed by a race for bigger models trained on larger datasets, distracting from smarter approaches that look for meaning and train on curated datasets.
• Their warnings have gone unheeded. Apart from OPen AIs models, AI company Antropic has introduced a ChatGPT competitor named Claude.
• Google recently announced PaLM, a model trai