OpenAI’s ChatGPT is everywhere. Students are using it draft essays, therapists experimenting with it can for counselling, it is passing MBA exams with consummate ease with universities panicking and contemplating going back to handwritten exams. It seems to write instant sonnets and haikus on the Second World War, the Webb Telescope and makki-ki-roti with equal effortlessness. It has rocketed to 100mn users in a mere two months; Twitter took five plodding years and even the WWW took seven! ChatGPT is the poster boy of a larger movement in AI, called Generative AI (GenAI), sometimes also referred to as Large Language Models, Foundation Models, or Transformers. Other well-known manifestations of Generative AI are DALL E2 and Stable Diffusion which transform prompts into spectacular art, and the text-generator GPT3, which is where ChatGPT originated from.

The spectacular performance of Generative AI has people wondering and whether it will replace search and fearing whether it will take away the jobs of artists, programmers, consultants, and journalists. In this hyper-excitement, fear, and confusion, I have abstracted Five Core Principles of Generative AI, to help you negotiate this fundamental new technology.

One: This is Generative AI, use it to Generate: ChatGPT is not search and it is not built to be. Search is structured as a database, GenAIs are neural networks that have been trained on massive bodies of text to process and, in particular, generate language. They ingest millions of sentences, paragraphs, pictures, and even samples of dialogue and learn the statistical patterns that govern how each of these elements should be assembled in a sensible order. They have been sometimes called the world’s most powerful autocomplete technologies. What you must remember is that these models strategize to be plausible instead of truthful. So, do not look for facts and perfection in them, at least not yet. Use them to generate – ideas for your essay, art for your brochures or just for pleasure, possibilities for your research, even itineraries for your next travel. When you want to search, use a search engine; when you want to generate possibilities, use ChatGPT, etc. The new Bing does both side by side, it does not substitute core search by a chatbot.

Two: AI will not replace you, a person using it could: Journalists, artists, programmers, tax advisors are worried that the work they do can now easily be done by ChatGPT and its ilk. That is not entirely correct. GenAI will definitely impact jobs, but if used well, it will enhance most of them. A programmer can use it to write basic code, before putting her creativity and talent to complete it and make it more elegant. A student can use it to generate some ideas for their dissertation, a dermatologist can theoretically use it to narrow down prognosis possibilities, an artist can use DALL E2 to create some funky art, which she can then work on, and a journalist can structure his piece using it. People who quickly learn the skill of using ChatGPT will be able to work faster and better than people who ignore it; as people using computers, search, and the Internet did. So, do not fear AI, embrace it and better be the person who uses it to replace someone who does not, rather than the other way around!

Three: The GenAI horizontals are interesting, the verticals will be useful: OpenAI’s GPT3 (and soon, GPT4), and competing offerings from Google, Baidu, etc, are interesting, since they are the core large models which have dazzled us with their human-like capabilities. However, what will be really useful are the ‘verticals’ being built with lightning speed on them. The horizontals are like the ‘clouds’ on which these useful apps are built. ChatGPT in a simplistic sense is a chat vertical on GPT3, and there are many others. Elicit allows us to search academic papers for a research question you might have, Copy.ai and Jasper are great tools for creating ad copy, Copilot generates code, Cohere.ai helps you to generate and organise your thoughts. There are hundreds more, with new ones getting created every day. These will be ones which will help you with improve your jobs, your business, and large parts of your life. Watch out for the verticals.

Four: Generative AI will be as transformative as search, email, social: Technology continues to evolve, but there are times when something revolutionary happens. The Internet and WWW was one such moment, so was email, search, and the smartphone. They fundamentally changed our lives and businesses, it can be argued whether for better or worse. I believe that GenAI is one such fundamental inflection point. GenAI was not built overnight, it has been many decades in the making. AI, in fact, is more than a sixty-year old technology, and the first LLM was perhaps ELIZA developed by MIT’s Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966. AI and Machine Learning has been used in enterprises, social networks, search and almost everything else for decades; it is like electricity or the steam engine, a General Purpose Technology. What ChatGPT and DALL E2 have done, however, is to reveal this incredible tech to us – we can see, feel, and use it. For this kind of GenAI, it is just the beginning. We are going to see many more astounding products coming out over 2023 and beyond. Five: Generative AI is not AGI: Artificial General Intelligence has been the Holy Grail of AI, when it becomes as and more intelligent than humans. Some experts are predicting that the fastest road to AGI is GenAI, an ex-Google engineer even said that its GenAI creation (LaMDA, now Bard) is sentient. In my opinion, this is not true. ChatGPT has no intelligence or sentience or emotion, as it repeatedly claims itself. It is a prediction and generation engine at hyper scale. It does not know facts, has severe limitations and ethical issues, and ‘hallucinates’ its way through conversations. It is an amazing tool but will need a fundamental rethink on how we are building AI to move to actual AGI. I leave the last word to the Chinese AI guru Kai Fu Lee: “AI is serendipity. It is here to liberate us from routine jobs, and it is here to remind us what it is that makes us human.”