AI advancements and the lack of awareness
Much of the Western tech world is abuzz and alarmed by ChatGPT - a chatbot trained upon billions and billions of websites and books, capable of capable of providing well-articulated and relevant answers on almost every topic.
But I'm less concerned about ChatGPT than about the fact that, in real life, almost no educated person around me has even heard about it, much less used it.
And that includes hundreds of Indian software engineers that I'm surrounded with (obviously not on social media). That is extremely worrying on so many counts.
What we're witnessing are momentous events in the history of our civilization. And I'm really not overstating here.
ChatGPT is obviously not perfect, but it's able to do things RIGHT NOW that you would not expect a machine to do. You can get pretty good poetry out of it and placed side-by-side with a "real" poem, most people will not be able to see the difference. And we all know that the art it's generating is good enough for it to win prestigious competitions.
You can directly paste many school math or science problem, and it'll give you the correct answer with each step explained. It does struggle with some problems, but that's just a matter of time.
You see, the current GPT model uses 175 billion parameters, but the next one is rumoured to employ trillions. And while the number of parameters is not always the deciding factor, it definitely IS a factor. Moreover, the AI is yet to be trained on the entire corpus of YouTube videos available on the internet.
Nobody wants to bet that within the next 5 years (and possibly earlier), such models would not be able to solve graduate-level problems with perfection. Alongside the capability to design entire software suites just from their English description, with just very high-level human involvement.
Do we realise what impact this is going to have on our jobs and lives when the technology starts getting actually applied in the industry? We haven't even started to scratch the surface of what is possible to achieve with such a system. Trust the private sector to use it in hitherto unthought ways to cut costs (and jobs)
Indian economy is, to a large extent, shored up by the money software developers generate. What will happen when those jobs are drastically reduced? Along with millions of other jobs that these AI models are going to make irrelevant? And not in some distant future, but very very soon. Like 10 years or perhaps even 5.
Have you planned for such a future? For the loss of your job and how you'll support your family? Have you analyzed how likely is your job to be replaced?
It's perfectly reasonable to be alarmist when the stakes are so high. These are unprecedented events in history and we have no examples to guide us. We're sleepwalking into a future which is going to fundamentally different from now, but we're treating it like just another tech news that we can safely ignore.
This time, however, we really can't.