Weekend ChatGPT and AI roundup

some dystopian stuff, new product lines, creativity, OpenAI makes it rain

This a post I’ve been storing in my drafts for a while and I just decided to post it now to clear out some space. It’s a ChatGPT/AI/LLM post.

This week saw a major update to the product lines at OpenAI. On Monday, at the young company’s first ever development conference, they announced a bunch of things, not all of which have I had time to play around with. One is the updating of their GPT-4 large language model. It’s now trained on texts through April 2023 (instead of January 2022), and has some non-trivial improvements. It’s called GPT-4 Turbo. Inside ChatGPT-4 — the chatbot that runs on GPT-4 Turbo — you now have a dramatically larger amount of text you can have it ingest, as much as 300 pages. There has also been declines announced in the price of creating your own bots using them, plus now ChatGPT-4 will always have access to Bing to search, DALL-E 3 to create images and upload to access your images and files all in the same dataset.

But the other thing that is new and exciting is GPTs. GPTs is OpenAIs name for bots. They’ve also released the ability to build your own bots using their tools and you only use prompting to create them. There’s a build environment you can access via the browser and while I haven’t made one, I’ve begun making one, and when I’m done I’ll share it on here. Also coming is a marketplace to sell these little toys to one another. I suspect that the marketplace will spur a lot of use cases and adoption. Remember first mover advantage and the long tail. Why don’t you go ahead and start playing around with making them. There’s a lot of tools there and given how sizeable this upgrade was from the last, even if this isn’t everything, my hunch is the billion dollars OpenAI has generated this year in revenue (up from $25m last year) is going towards things that are making it clear that tools are likely to be democratized.

The thing you should know is I think it’s possible AI and large language models selects on skills related to creativity. Many people feel creative but can’t code. I think you may be in luck. I highly encourage kids out there to play around with this and see if you can develop innovative use cases that represent your personality. Dig deep into the weirdest things you think need to be made and make them. There’s no barriers to entry, so it’s going to be a Darwinian free for all once that marketplace is here but there won’t be homogenous goods bought and sold. You’ll have first mover advantage. Some kid is going to make a weird dungeon master chatbot that makes them $1m within the first seven days of its appearance or who knows. It’s likely going to be you too. So that’s just something to think about. And with the ability to access python, there just may be things you can see to use no one else can, so I encourage people who are creative to consider looking at this. Forbes has some advice too.

But below are some links to interesting articles. Have a great weekend