Sean’s brain is processing all its inputs and growing neurons at a rate of knots … now think about the equivalent happening exponentially in a model that can draw on the resources of the entire internet …

“Didn’t she just write about AI this month?” you might be thinking. Yes, I did write about Stable Diffusion, but already there is another exciting AI programme taking the internet by storm – ChatGPT. People around the world have the opportunity to use ChatGPT online at present; anyone can sign up for an account and discover ChatGPT’s capabilities for free. So what is ChatGPT? I’ll let it speak for itself – I typed in my questions and ChatGPT’s answers appeared at a similar speed to the speed at which I type.

You can ask ChatGPT whatever you want and it will give you a response based on its capabilities at the time. I asked it to write a poem about a capybara and a bandsaw.

Hmmm…not bad but not the most innovative or exciting poetry. At present ChatGPT seems to write poems of the same length and in the same style by default. I could get more prescriptive.

I wondered what ChatGPT might think about contentious topics and found it wasn’t necessarily expressing both sides of the argument.

However, when I asked it about the future of AI, it was more equivocal.

What is unequivocal is that the potential power of AI is going to increase exponentially, given that each model can learn from all the new inputs it is getting. One could think of ChatGPT as a baby, rapidly learning from the many millions of people who are interacting with it as I write. If this is what a baby can do…

A pile of pee?