Computing Guru criticizes ChatGPT AI Tech for making things up

Vint Cerf, one of the founding fathers of the Internet, has harsh words for the suddenly popular technology behind the ChatGPT AI chatbot: “Snake oil”.

Google’s Internet evangelist wasn’t completely disappointed with the AI ​​technology behind ChatGPT and Google’s own competitor, called a Great Language Model. But, speaking at Celesta Capital’s TechSurge summit on Monday, he warned of the ethical issues of technology that can generate plausible but incorrect information, even when formed on the basis of fact.

If an executive tried to get him to apply ChatGPT to a business problem, his response would be to call it snake oil, referring to fake drugs sold by charlatans in the 1800s, he said. Another ChatGPT metaphor involved kitchen appliances.

“It’s like a salad shooter — you know how lettuce goes everywhere,” Cerf said. “The facts are all over the place, and he’s mixing them up because he doesn’t know any better.”

Cerf shared the 2004 Turing Award, the top prize in computer science, for helping to develop the Internet foundation called TCP/IP, which transfers data from one computer to another by breaking it into small, individually addressed packets that can borrow different routes from source to source. destination. He is not an AI researcher, but he is a computer engineer who would like to see his colleagues improve the shortcomings of AI.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT and competitors like Google’s Bard have the potential to dramatically transform our online lives by answering questions, writing emails, summarizing presentations, and performing many other tasks. Microsoft has started integrating OpenAI’s language technology into its Bing search engine in a significant challenge for Google, but it’s using its own web index to try to “ground” OpenAI flights with authoritative and worthy material. of confidence.

Cerf said he was surprised to learn that ChatGPT could fabricate false information from a factual basis. “I asked him, ‘Write me a biography of Vint Cerf.’ He was wrong about a lot of things,” Cerf said. It was then that he learned the inner workings of the technology – that it uses statistical patterns spotted from massive amounts of training data to construct its response.

“He knows how to string together a sentence that’s grammatically likely to be correct,” but he has no real knowledge of what he’s saying, Cerf said. “We are far from the self-awareness that we want.”

OpenAI, which earlier in February launched a $20-a-month plan to use ChatGPT, has been clear about the technology’s shortcomings but aims to improve it through “continuous iteration.”

“ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible but incorrect or nonsensical answers. Solving this problem is a challenge,” the Artificial Intelligence Research Lab said when it launched ChatGPT in November.

Cerf also hopes for progress. “Engineers like me should be responsible for trying to find a way to tame some of these technologies so that they’re less likely to cause problems,” he said.

Cerf’s comments contrasted with those of another Turing Award winner at the conference, chip design pioneer and former Stanford president John Hennessy, who offered a more optimistic assessment of AI.

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