AI, or artificial intelligence, is a huge concept that will dominate many fields and industries in the years to come – including IT. Do you think I’m exaggerating? Let’s take a look at what AI can do even now and what possibilities it has to offer.
Author of the article: Martin Smětala
Artificial intelligence is being developed by many companies, including industry leaders such as Google, Microsoft, Meta, Tesla and others. It is a tool that allows, among other things, to find solutions to problems that the human brain could not invent, let alone meaningfully describe in computer language.AI gives machines the capacity to mimic human abilities such as reasoning, learning, planning or creativity. In simplified terms, AI is a “self-learning” algorithm that receives massive amounts of data and expected results as input. The actual solution that leads to the result must then be developed by the AI.
AI learns based on machine learning. For example, the input may contain millions of photographs, some of which show a person and some of which do not. For each photo, it also gets a “solution” in the form of information about which photo shows a person and which does not. On these photos, the algorithm learns what a person actually looks like (that they have hair, two eyes, a mouth, a nose, legs, arms, etc.). The more (varied) input data, the more accurately the AI learns to recognize a person Verification of the correct function of the algorithm is then performed on brand new photos that the AI has not yet seen. If the AI had the correct input and output data, the AI will be able to correctly distinguish those that depict a person from those that do not.
One popular AI company is OpenAI, which allows the public to try out some of their AI features for free (e.g. the DALL-E text-to-image generator). And it is OpenAI, or rather their most current AI called ChatGPT, that this article will focus on.
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ChatGPT
ChatGPT is the latest generation of artificial network language model, released at the end of November 2022, and its specialty is that it can produce human-like texts (i.e. texts that look like they were written by a human). All communication can be in any language. However, the best results are achieved with English.
What does the interaction look like? You start by describing the task, and you can also specify what form the result of your query is expected to take. ChatGPT will give you the solution in a few seconds, as if written by a human.
In addition, ChatGPT can not only understand and work with text perfectly, but it can also create programming code or find errors in it. That’s right, programming code in Java, React or even Brainfuck. It’s probably not necessary to describe the excitement this new AI model has caused in the IT community.
To ensure that AI is not just for the chosen few, thanks to OpenAI, anyone can try out the capabilities of the new ChatGPT for free. Just visit www.openai.com and go through the registration process. After the initial tutorial, a window with the beautiful name “Playground” appears.
Let’s see how this AI handles something like a basic query.
Well, that was really simple, but quite funny. Let’s try something harder.
That was also pretty simple, but let’s try adding one condition to change the result – for example that the animals run in the desert and a longer route, so the winner should be a camel.
We finally caught the AI off guard – logic questions are still a challenge. There’s even a whole thread on Twitter where Sergey Ivanov measured the IQ of ChatGPT and came up with 83, which is still below the average of the general population. On the other hand, 7 years ago, the IQ of the then existing AI was that of a 4-year-old child. It now matches the level of a 14-year-old primary school student. Quite a progress.
What has also been solved compared to older versions are answers to trick questions given in the form of an abstract question that deliberately makes no sense.
The fact is that ChatGPT is mainly a text-based tool, so let’s leave the logical or mathematical tasks behind and get down to how it handles text. How about describing what makes LinkedIn the best tool for finding candidates and how to use it properly, but in the style of 1940s gangster movies?
Well, yeah, that’s not bad. Let’s raise the bar even higher. How about a funny poem about Java (hopefully Java fans will forgive me).
Still not enough? Let’s go a little deeper into IT and add some HR. Let’s make ChatGPT compare candidates and evaluate them according to the client’s input and priorities.
As you can see, the AI has correctly handled the various parameters of the project and selected the right candidate as Mark. If we were to change priorities and take salary as the most important, it would pick Candidate 2 as the right one.
Let’s see where it stands with programming languages. First, let’s warm up a bit by evaluating which programming language is currently doing the best according to the AI:
Let’s develop something using ChatGPT. How about a Java application that can calculate a standard differential equation?
The AI also uses comments, which is most welcome. Is it therefore also possible to use ChatGPT to create documentation retrospectively? It’s very likely. It can also find bugs in the entered code. ChatGPT has plenty of programming capabilities. I haven’t found a programming language that ChatGPT cannot use yet. It can handle everything, even such “peculiarities” as Elixir, Tailwind, LaTex, Numba…
It is true that if you want to create a really complex code, the AI runs out of steam and makes mistakes, as Karel Javůrek has found out for himself. In short, what the AI can’t find on GitHub, StackOverflow or elsewhere and needs to devise itself, then it’s very likely to start making mistakes. Even so, its programming ability is admirable.
What is ChatGPT actually capable of according to actual user experiments?
- Better search than what Google normally offers
- Brainstorming of all kinds
- Writing tutorials
- Education (essays, tests, etc.)
- Entertainment (jokes, poems…)
- Therapy/conversation
- Working with code of all kinds (debugging, finding solutions, rewriting…)
Security is a big deal with a tool like ChatGPT, of course. No one wants AI to advise on how to steal a car or hack into a banking system. OpenAI has gone to great lengths to ensure that the AI responds evasively in these cases, but some users have already found tricks to get around the security barriers, such as using simulated conversations. It’s clear that AI security will certainly be a huge topic.
And if you think ChatGPT is just a smart joiner of texts it finds on the internet, you can take the red pill from Morpheus from The Matrix and read the article where Frederic Besse created a virtual machine on a Linux console in ChatGPT and ran another ChatGPT in it. Very impressive.
ChatGPT is simply a big step ahead. But where is the ahead? So far, it looks like the AI is heading towards being man’s best friend, but we’ll have to be very careful to ensure that the famous Skynet from the Terminator never comes to be.
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