Who is driving the AI commotion and why
Marine Investors are asking questions
Who is driving the AI commotion, today, and why? Marine Investors are asking questions, which deserve replies from technology companies. Because AI, as of the last few months, benefits from an extraordinary amount of promotion and discussion. With many arguments going on between advocates and opponents. And there’s another group, the common sense types like marine investors, who ask “What is the angle?” Who is driving the promotion and why?”
A major advocate of today’s AI is Bill Gates.
So, the common sense types are inclined to speculate on his motives and those of other notables promoting AI recently. So, when the most successful person in the largest industry in the world is driving a major promotion, a first guess, that it is good for him and for his investments, is a safe guess.
(Microsoft is a major investor in Open AI’s Chat GPT and is incorporating the software into Bing Microsoft search engine).
Silicon Valley plans
This leads our common sense types to ponder Silicon Valley plans. And to make another safe guess. Namely that the giants in the largest industry in the world want to continue their expansion, and that today’s AI promotion will help them achieve this. Just as empires always sought to increase their conquests, so do the huge conglomerates and industrial groups. And as we well know, empires and industrial groups were not and continue not to be charities or religious entities. So, it is reasonable expect to find self-interest somewhere along the way.
To sum up, currently AI is being promoted by the largest companies, who are no other than the status quo of Information Technology. And the motivation behind the huge promotion is self-interest.
Speculative guesses
So, we know who is driving the AI commotion and to a certain extent we know why. And we can’t escape knowing that today the commotion is about ChatGPT. So, the intense promotion of ChatGPT AI merits some speculative guesses about who stands to benefit and which areas of our life and businesses it is most likely to affect.
- How we write and how we find content on the internet. Promoting a successful product like ChatGPT promises to revolutionize how we write and how we find content on the internet. This is clearly a leap forward that benefits search engines and text authoring tools.
- Retrieval of content and data. ChatGPT AI is so much better than previously popular tools at finding and generating text, that retrievals of content and data might be more successful and relevant to our needs. Surely then, this also will generate more income for companies like Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, making best use of it.
- AI regulation Artificial Generative Intelligence is so impressive, via its fast forward demonstration of what computers can do for us, that it has made people conscious of the power of computing. For instance, ChatGPT stands for “Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer”. So, the ChatGPT models are created using ‘generative pre-training’, which means they train on huge amounts of text data to predict the next word in a given sequence. This then necessitates rigorous generative pre-training and regulation in order to steer clear of errors or inappropriate content. So, this has convinced the EU to take advice for AI regulation from Google, Microsoft and Open AI. This is a major strategic move to control the AI industry by making it safer and cheaper to leave AI to the giants of Information Technology.
This again benefits Silicon Valley and might cause concern to investors who wish to invest in AI that is relevant to verticals. But is there something radically different in what was called AI in the 1960’s and today’s AI?
Pattern recognition methods
“Artificial Intelligence” is perhaps a glorified name for a family of computerized pattern recognition methods. “Well-structured and labelled data is used to train the models to later have them recognize ‘things’ in unstructured data. Once the ‘things’ are found some additional algorithm can act on them,” effecting what we know as machine learning (ML). And until now, all the large language models (LLMs), which search engines rely on, use algorithms that result in ‘machine learning’ (ML).
ChatGPT
“ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that was initially built on a family of large language models (LLMs) collectively known as GPT-3 and developed by Open AI. Generative AI models have been trained on huge amounts of data.
“For example, ChatGPT’s most promoted GPT-3.5 model was trained on 570GB of text data from the internet, which OpenAI says included books, articles, websites, and social media. Because it’s been trained on hundreds of billions of words, ChatGPT can create responses that make it seem like, in its own words, “a friendly and intelligent robot” Michael Wilson
“The first thing to explain is that what ChatGPT is always fundamentally trying to do is to produce a “reasonable continuation” of whatever text it’s got so far, where by “reasonable” we mean “what one might expect someone to write after seeing what people have written on billions of webpages, etc.” Stephen Wolfram
To sum up, although ChatGPT is not radically different than what we already know and use, it does it far better than the previously popular tools. We started this article by saying that there is a category of people we call the common sense types. And common sense types care about how relevant generative AI information will be for their goals and purposes. And they are also concerned about business disruptive technology.
Change in the world and our businesses
So, is this new AI going to change the world and our businesses? What, in which areas and in what ways?
- Content. Professional companies, who offer services to improve SEO (search engine optimization) and websites, already use ChatGPT to propose better website content. But already they are encountering pricing problems, since free ChatGPT content “forces” them to lower their prices.
- Personal productivity. ChatGPT could positively affect productivity for people writing essays, articles and making presentations with good pictures… And if general information is sought, such as for this modest write-up, then generative AI will do a great job and will eliminate much of the work associated with producing content. However, within a company framework, generative AI changes in personal productivity could create problems. Here, however, the disruption depends on the type of business.
- Education. Much in education is about general collection and collation of content so much of this will be assisted or replaced by generative AI.
- Legal services. We should not underestimate the effect of generative AI on legal content, which in itself is expensive to generate, difficult to compare and endless in volume. We believe it will not eliminate higher level legal or legislative work. Only the endless comparison of texts, which today is still primarily manual or automated at a very low level of word and phrase differences.
So, with generative AI we might see some positive outcomes and collaborative efforts between stakeholders to assess the shortcomings of texts with legal status. This will be a positive development for drawing up contracts, laws, legislature drafting and related endeavours. Because these processes are arguably outdated and, in many cases, cause more problems than they solve.
In the examples presented, generative AI will be a disruptive technology. But we need not fear this disruption. What is alarming is the possibility of providing the chatbot with poor commands so that the application produces dangerous results. But this is problem with AI generally. At the end of this article, business and technology leaders refer to these dangers.
Relevance
Does ChatGPT understand relevance?
The communication skills of a chatbot should not be limited to remembering how others expressed themselves. And a person, who is writing an essay, will not be happy to be able to quote masses of collated information to compose something interesting. In both cases the indispensable element is relevance. Just like a good conversation is about relevance, not about regurgitating what someone else said.
Even when regurgitating, the trick is to break down the material you are regurgitating and applying it in a relevant way.
And if one is looking for relevant results or new insights that aren’t available on the internet, then generative AI will not help. People argue that chat GPT can be creative by adding correlations that might fit. But going through correlated material in order to find relevance is not efficient for personal or collaborative productivity.
Creating your own chatbot
Creating your own chatbot, which is possible, will be time consuming and can never give results that goal driven shipping investors need. Unless there is a model underpinning the chatbot that understands risk, based on a chosen goal. And a goal model that persists the propagation of the cause and effect relationships between the processes that make up the goal.
Is AI moving fast?
Generative AI is certainly moving fast. Microsoft, Open AI, Apple and Google have entered the race and are in competition. And the media are covering every step and pushing the message that our lives are about to change.
But Generative AI is not the only AI, and neither is it important as an aspect of AI.
Effectively, there is much more to AI. And it’s not new or related to ChatGPT. For example, AI that can make cars self-driving and AI that operates advanced weapons systems such as drones.
If we needed to define the AI we know about, we would agree with the experts who say that AI is computing; computing that is so impressive as to seem intelligent. And we would concede that the media hypes up computing capabilities in order to create awe in the public. This explains the mediatic efforts to present ChatGPT as lifelike, and its impressive results, as Artificial Intelligence. In other words intelligence in competition with human intelligence and able to overtake human capabilities. All this is not new.
Finally, AI that can simulate the most basic common sense associated with humans, which actually is Artificial General Intelligence, is not moving very fast. This is an aspect of AI that interests us. And it will interest Marine Investors also. In articles to come, we will discuss automated learning for computers that is based on our human ability to make good plans based on experience.
What the business and technology leaders are saying
Before closing, let’s listen to what the technology and business leaders are saying about generative AI.
Bill Gates – Gates sees AI integration into search engines as a “personal agent” that studies and understands its users’ behaviour.
He also sees it as “a pretty dramatic potential reshuffling of how tech markets look.”
And he has written that building AI is “as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the internet, and the mobile phone.”
Sam Altmann – OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in December 2022, said that the AI chatbot is “incredibly limited” and that “it’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now”
Andy Jassy – Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said he is excited to see “what’s possible with generative AI” Interview with the Financial Times.
But Jassy thinks that this latest iteration of AI is nothing new. “Most large, deeply technical companies like ours, have been working on these very large, generative AI models themselves for a long time,” Jassy said.
Satya Nadella – Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is cautiously optimistic about AI’s future. In an interview with CBS Mornings, Nadella said that humans must be “unambiguously, unquestionably” in charge of powerful AI models to prevent them from going out of control.
If that happens, Nadella said “runaway AI” could be “a real problem,”
Nadella told The Verge in an interview that he hopes the “new Bing” will make its competitor Google “come out and show that they can dance.”
Kevin O’Leary – Television personality and businessman Kevin O’Leary said he’s using ChatGPT more than Google for online research. REUTERS/Gus Ruelas
“ChatGPT certainly is a threat to Google, and Google must know that” O’Leary said. “The AI search wars are on.”
Vint Cerf – widely known as one of the fathers of the internet — wants investors to consider the ethics around AI.
He has reportedly said that investors pouring money into AI tools are buying into the hype around buzzy tools like ChatGPT:
“If you think, ‘Man, I can sell this to investors because it’s a hot topic and everyone will throw money at me,’ don’t do that…”.
Charlie Munger – Billionaire investor
“Artificial intelligence is very important, but there’s also a lot of crazy hype on the subject.” Daily Journal meeting broadcast live on CNBC
“AI is not going to cure cancer, it’s not going to do everything that we want done, and there’s a lot of nonsense in it too,”
Munger said AI can be used for tasks like insurance underwriting, but it might not be … very helpful in the task of buying an office building, for example.
Likewise, we would say that AI is not going to help buy a ship or perform a drydocking
Closing words
We sincerely hope you found value in the experts’ views about the AI and ChatGPT AI. And that you enjoyed our newsletter, Who Is Driving the AI Commotion and Why. It was first published on LinkedIn, and we encourage you to assist us by subscribing and sharing it. Our goal is to enter into a discussion with our readers on a monthly basis. Our topics will be hot technology subjects in the context of the maritime industry’s painpoints.
Ulysses Systems is a Maritime software specialist. It’s award winning Task Assistant® Software enables office and seagoing personnel to work intuitively and efficiently with minimal training and just-in-time information. Managers should expect a fast return on total software lifecycle cost thanks to mature process optimization, bridging of information gaps and refined integration technologies. Currently Ulysses Systems is pioneering fast development of new annexes to existing software, including monitoring underlying systems for cybersecurity compliance.
