Get ready, because there are things coming down the pipeline on the artificial intelligence front that are just going to make your hair stand on end within the next year," warns Jordan Peterson, the renowned Canadian media personality and clinical psychologist. "There is so much transformation going on in that domain, and it's been the case particularly for the last six months that it's almost unimaginable."
This statement sets the tone for the mind-blowing revelations about a new AI system called GPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer). GPT is a language processing model that has been trained on a massive corpus of text and is able to analyze and generate responses in a variety of styles and topics.
But don't just take Peterson's word for it. He had a firsthand experience interacting with GPT: "I said to it, 'Write me an essay that's a 13th rule for Beyond Order, written in a style that combines the King James Bible with the doubted chain.' That's pretty difficult to pull off... Well, it wrote it in about three seconds, four pages long, and it isn't obvious to me, for better or worse, that I would be able to tell that I didn't write it."
GPT's capabilities don't stop there. It was also able to write an essay on the intersection between Taoist ethics and the Sermon on the Mount, and provide a comprehensive analysis and grade for its own work. It even wrote the screenplay and character descriptions for a hypothetical $900 million Hollywood blockbuster. And when given descriptions of actors, GPT was able to generate photorealistic images of them.
But the most concerning development, according to Peterson, is that within the next year GPT will be able to use real-world data to further improve its capabilities. This advancement could have major consequences, as Peterson predicts that "a third of universities will go broke in the next five years." The reason? GPT's intelligence is on par with the average student at a well-functioning public university, and it has the potential to automate tasks previously done by professors and students.
Peterson concludes, "This is a big deal. This AI system is smarter than you. And I don't know what sort of technological revolution this is, but it's a smart one."
We can only wait and see what the future holds as AI systems like GPT continue to advance and transform society and the economy. But one thing is for sure: it's going to be a wild ride.
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