Blinded by Analogies (One Useful Thing)
Images: Ethan Mollick
Some lessons of the insane past 4 days of generative AI, as someone who had access to Bing during and after the "Sydney" era. (Trying this as a long tweet rather than a thread...)
1) Bing AI was two things: a chatbot and an evolution of ChatGPT into a web-connected, supercharged form. There is no reason these two things had to be connected, but they were.
2) The new Bing AI version of search and retrieval (without the chatbot) is much more powerful than ChatGPT. It has some of the same issues (like hallucination and terrible math) but less so, and is capable of some really extraordinary tasks. When I put it to the test, it can do things like read multiple research papers and identify gaps; improve its own writing by asking it to look at online examples of good writing; and do complex analyses integrating diverse information. The work was really, really impressive.
3) The Bing Chatbot was often unsettling. I say that as someone who knows that there is no actual personality or entity behind a LLM model. But, even knowing that it was basically auto-completing a dialog based on my prompts, it felt like you were dealing with a real person. I never attempted to "jailbreak" the chatbot or make it act in any particular way, but I still got answers that felt extremely personal, and interactions that made the bot feel intentional.
4) The lesson of the Chatbot was that we can very easily be fooled by an AI into thinking it is sentient. It isn't just Turing Test passing, it is eerily convincing even if you know it is a bot, and even at this very early stage of evolution. Even if Bing isn't doing this anymore, there is no doubt other AI bots will come along, and may already be deployed (I assume governments have LLMs at the level of Bing, but with less guardrails). We should be considering about what that means.
5) The lesson of the Bing AI version of ChatGPT is that many of the things we thought AI would be bad at for awhile (complex integration of data sources, "learning" and improving by being told to look online for examples, seemingly creative suggestions based on research, etc.) are already possible. There is no doubt it will have a large effect on anyone doing information-based work. Early AI assistants, like Copilot, already cut the time for complex tasks like coding in half. This will do the same, or more, across many industries. I think every organization that has a substantial analysis or writing component to their work will need to figure out how to incorporate these new tools fast, because the competitive advantage gain is potentially enormous. And there is no instruction manual. You can only learn through trial-and-error. We got a glimpse of the future in the past few days, and the gap between ChatGPT (which is already causing waves in many industries) and Bing AI remains enormous. I was not expecting things in AI to keep moving this fast, but now there is every indication they will continue to do so. I don't think anyone knows what this all means, but I think we should be ready for a very weird world.
Ethan Mollick, Twitter | Read more:
[ed. A distillation of this article: The future, soon: what I learned from Bing's AI.]
[ed. The aftershocks of recent revelations about the behavior of chatbots like ChatGPT and Bing continue to reverberate. However, attention now seems to be moving away from various implications of the technology (how it works; what it can and can't do; threats, etc.) to more practical considerations like uses, ie. how best to utilize and apply these tools and especially, commercialize them. Mr. Mollick makes the point (my interpretation) that they're especially well-suited for complex search/analyses and creative solutions - creative recombination - eg. generating new ideas (like the watch naming example above, to "make up new names for luxury smartwatches inspired by Shakespeare"). Of course, online businesses (and advertisers) are also accutely interested in this topic: The Chatbots Are Here, and the Internet Industry Is in a Tizzy (NY Times). In any case, it's obvious we're just in the earliest stages of a revolution that will be massively transforming.]
