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TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN: ChatGPT, LLMs, and the Use Cases for Semi-Smart AI By Evan Anderson FiRe is back! Register now for Future in Review to take advantage of Summer Earlybird pricing. FiRe returns live at the beautiful Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, CA, November 6-9. Join old friends and new at this life-changing event. _____ Why Read: The public release of OpenAI's ChatGPT has caused quite a stir, to put it mildly, and led other companies to follow suit. This week's issue covers just what these tools are and are not good for. _______ It's useless. It's going to kill us all. The world is ending. The world is just beginning. Since the November 2022 public release of OpenAI's ChatGPT language learning model (LLM) tool, the hot takes in online discussions of the implications of the modern era of AI just keep coming. Everyone in tech seems to have chimed in, with opinions ranging from the preposterously pessimistic to the outrageously optimistic. The range is so broad and risible that graphic designer Micah Daigle hopped into Midjourney and made caricatures of key players after listening to countless podcasts on the topic.
Despite all the bluster, a key aspect of the debate is mostly missing from the higher echelons of strategic AI thought leadership. Very rarely do we hear detailed explanations of the actual use cases of the technology as it exists now. The biggest fears may not be warranted, if this AI is used mostly in casual applications. At the moment, people are frantically trying to plug-in ChatGPT and other, similar tools to find out if they're useful. This is innocuous enough when it comes to playing around at home; many of us have likely had a fantastic time playing games with these new tools, for they are indeed shiny. Whether they can be used in the workplace to do effective, bigger work things, however, remains to be seen. Despite the great hubbub surrounding these tools, the collective answer so far seems to be, "Uh, sort of, I guess? Probably not, maybe? Oh gawd, don't use it for that." Let's take a case-by-case look at how useful these tools really are.
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