Gary Smith and Jeffrey Funk, frequent Mind Matters contributors, co-wrote a piece at Salon on the over-exaggerated dreams big tech has for AI. They write,

Silicon Valley’s pre-eminent leaders love prematurely predicting that their products will completely upend the world as we know it. The latest case study comes from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT AI chatbot that has gone viral for its convincing imitations of human writing. Two years ago, Altman wrote a manifesto, “Moore’s Law for Everything,” in which he forecast that artificial intelligence would make huge swaths of both white collar and blue collar jobs obsolete.

-Smith & Funk, Don’t believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research | Salon.com

Despite the hype over the apparent ways AI will overrun human society and experience, Smith and Funk suggest a more temperate view. While ChatGPT is an impressive creation, and is causing concern for certain industries, such as the creative arts (see today’s report on that here) it nevertheless bungles answers, offers responses that sound authoritative but are actually false, and is all around less reliable than figures like Sam Altman claim.

Gary Smith writes more on this issue in this piece here.

For further reading:

• Does New A.I. Live Up to the Hype? | Mind Matters
• Large Language Models Can Entertain but Are They Useful? | Mind Matters
• We Can’t Build a Hut to the Moon | Mind Matters