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What’s the Future for A.I.?
Published 4th April, 2023

By Michael Dubois, Head of Corporate at VG Global Holdings 

The new AI technology, spearheaded by the launch of the ChatGPT chatbot, has revolutionised the way every industry views itself as whole sectors of industry jostle for position to take advantage of this development.

A recent demonstration involved Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and Co-Founder, showing off a feature that is still unavailable to the public by giving the bot a photograph from the Hubble Space Telescope and asking it to describe the image “in painstaking detail” – the description was completely accurate, right down to the strange white line created by a satellite streaking across the heavens. This offered a glimpse into the future as this new technology proved that it can juggle images, sounds and videos as well as text. The future is indeed very bright.

In the near term, generative A.I.s can answer questions, both simple and complex, write poetry, generate computer code and carry on conversations, up to point – basically the technology is focussed on conversational formats like ChatGPT and Bing.

However, things may soon change, and Microsoft and Google have already announced plans to incorporate A.I. technologies into their products, so a user will be able to use them to write a rough draft of an email, automatically summarize a meeting, write articles, and other such things.

In addition, OpenAI also offers an A.P.I. that other tech companies can use to plug GPT-4 into their apps and products, as well as creating a series of plug-ins from companies like Instacart, Expedia and Wolfram Alpha that expand ChatGPT’s abilities.

In the more medium term, most analysts believe that A.I. will make workers in many different industries, including doctors, lawyers and computer programmers, more productive than ever, and eventually, will probably replace many of them. It will do this by taking over the more repetitive and generic jobs, which both threatens people who specialise in these jobs, but also frees up time for people to concentrate more on other aspects of their work.

Audio-to-text transcription and translation work will be taken over by AI systems, and there are already plans for OpenAI-powered legal chatbots (the GPT-4 is already proficient enough to ace the bar exam). Companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta, are busy building systems that let you generate images and videos by describing what you want to see, while other companies are building bots that can actually use websites and software applications just like a human does. The next phase will be to take on things like hiring people to do small jobs around the house, or tracking your expenses.

The long-term future is truly mind-blowing as companies such as OpenAI and DeepMind seem determined to push this technology as far as it will go, eventually hoping to build what researchers call an A.G.I. (artificial general intelligence), a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. This will require an understanding of the physical world writ large, and it is still not yet clear whether systems can learn to mimic the length and breadth of human reasoning and common sense using the methods that have produced technologies like GPT-4, which means that new technological breakthroughs will be necessary.

AI is already changing the world as we know it, and it remains to be seen just how far it will go.