One year after the release of ChatGPT, we explore the positive and negative paths AI could take and what individuals can do to assist with a positive outcome.
Topics covered include:
- How David uses AI to increase his personal productivity
- The societal and economic impacts of AI, including its potential to enhance corporate profitability and individual productivity
- Changes at OpenAI’s executive level are examined, highlighting a shift in the organization’s direction and philosophy
- What is Effective Altruism and why is it so focused on the catastrophic risks of AI
- What are the phases that would lead to a singularity in which AI poses a threat to humanity
- Why AI is still in the early stages, and how should individuals, businesses and regulators treat it at this point
Show Notes
The economic and market impact of artificial intelligence—Capital Economics
The Fight for the Soul of A.I. by David Brooks—The New York Times
A.I. Belongs to the Capitalists Now by Kevin Roose—The New York Times
The ‘AI doomers’ have lost this battle by Benedict Evans—The Financial Times
What is the AI alignment problem and how can it be solved? by Edd Gent—NewScientist
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Related Episodes
417: Will Generative AI Replace Your Job?
439: How and Why to Invest in AI
Transcript
Welcome to Money for the Rest of Us. This is a personal finance show on money, how it works, how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. I’m your host, David Stein. Today is episode 457. It’s titled “AI’s a Fork in the Road: Societal Bliss or Existential Threat.”
ChatGPT
One year ago, OpenAI released ChatGPT. When it first came out, I was pretty skeptical. And then had begun to use it, and it’s really a fascinating example of how a tool can evolve or be adopted to increase one’s personal productivity. We first discussed ChatGPT 3 last January, in episode 417, “Will AI Replace Your Jobs?” And we talked about what generative AI is, and how basically it’s a very sophisticated word predictor. It’s been trained on reams and reams and billions of reams of data.
And I was skeptical. I wasn’t using it. I was fascinated by it, and we did a few experiments, but. It was okay. Six months later, July 2023, we released episode 439. By then, OpenAI had released ChatGPT 4, which was much more sophisticated. It had been trained on much more data. And I used it. I had, as I mentioned in that episode, some fairly complicated, complex back-and-forth discussions with ChatGPT, and it was at that time, or shortly thereafter that I invested in a couple of ETFs that I thought would be well-positioned to benefit from AI in the years ahead.
Now, another five months have passed, and I use ChatGPT every single day, on a wide variety of tasks. Bret asked me to run a query regarding advice on negotiating for a handpan, which is a relatively new, fascinating instrument that he plays. I provide ingredients to ChatGPT, and it creates recipes. I used it for a cranberry sauce recipe. I’ve used it to do translations, so helping with checking Spanish translations, understanding Greek words, ask health questions to it.
Mostly I’ve been using it in finance. We’re releasing a video this week where the formula is the Merton share, which is a formula for figuring out how much to allocate to riskier assets. We discussed that in a podcast episode last month. But it’s easier just to have ChatGPT put the formula there because it’s already formatted, and use that in the video.
We’ve used it for podcast outlines, or clarifications; help with creating titles. We’ve gone back and forth in discussions, fairly complex discussions on the underlying math of bonds, and fixed income, including duration, yield to maturity, convexity. We’ve used it to write ad copy. Some of our sponsors sometimes want us to write the copy, and we’ll interact with ChatGPT to create the copy.
We’ve used the DALL-E version by OpenAI, which creates images, to do YouTube thumbnails. Not as successful at that. A little over the top, and DALL-E cannot spell whatsoever. We’ve used it to summarize books, and at this point, it’s my go-to source with any question I have on any topic, including history, economics, finance. But I don’t trust it completely, so I always verify. I would not trust my life to this bot.
David Weinberger in his book Everyday Chaos, in speaking of AI, said “We don’t use these technologies because they’re huge, connected, and complex. We use them because they work.” And that’s why I use ChatGPT every day and pay for a Plus subscription for it. I think it’s $20 a month.
Back a year ago, a lot of the discussion regarding ChatGPT was “Well, is this humanlike? Can we trip it up to make it do crazy things?” And now a year has passed and I’m using it as a research tool, to help me become more productive.
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