The Machine Mindset

“The thing’s hollow – it goes on forever – and, oh my God, it’s full of stars!” - David Bowman, 2001: A Space Odyssey (novel) Last week, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman demoed some of the largely unreleased ChatGPT plugins at TED2023. At the same time, he provided more clarity on these plugins and their intended use-cases. Yesterday marked exactly one month ago that OpenAI tantalisingly announced that they will be introducing support for plugins in ChatGPT. We knew that this would enhance ChatGPT's capabilities beyond its built-in functionalities. But the specifics were a little bit unclear until now. Essentially, the various plugins will enable the language model to access real-time information from the web and other sources such as databases. Third-party services will allow it to perform actions such as booking a flight or ordering food on behalf of the user. And we will be able to access all of this func...

When humans talk to themselves (raising my own hand here!), other humans cast a side-eye. When AI does it, it’s heralded as the Next Big Thing. The past two weeks saw the rise of AutoGPT and similar apps, called "AI agents”. AutoGPT has so far garnered the most attention, so we’ll focus on that one. (Another name you may come across often is BabyAGI.) AutoGPT was created by Toran Bruce Richards, a game designer. And now, like mirrors within mirrors in the dazzling game of illusion that is AI, people are already building apps on top of the agents, too. But what even is an agent (except for, a bit worryingly, the guardians of the virtual world in The Matrix movies)? What is an AI agent? In computer science, an "agent" is a program that functions independently and continuously to perform various tasks. These could include archiving computer files or retrieving electronic messages on a scheduled bas...

If you’ve spent any time at all on social media recently, the Pope in a white puffer jacket or “Harry Potter by Balenciaga” (and its several spin-offs) may have caught your eye. Of course, AI-generated art and video are everywhere these days. To those of us who have only recently woken up to the AI revolution, the technology feels very recent. Arguably the most popular AI image generator, Midjourney, is not even a year old. Yet, computer-generated art has been slowly advancing for more than half a century and very quickly for the last decade or so. The evolution of neural networks, a crucial component of modern AI-generated imagery, started even longer ago – all the way back in the 1940s. Algorithm art: The early days In some sense, the birth of AI-generated imaging can be traced back to the 1960s. This is when researchers started exploring the use of computer algorithms to create digital images. One of the earliest examples of this is the work of A. Michael Noll...

“The future has not been written. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.” — John Connor Artificial intelligence (AI) is widely recognized as one of the most significant technology trends of the present day. According to PWC , it is projected that by 2030, AI will bolster the global GDP by $15.7 trillion. Yet more and more voices are speaking up, warning that we should pull in the reins. A significant number of experts believe we could instead be facing a scenario where a highly intelligent AI could eliminate all living beings on the planet. For this reason, many are now asking that the advancement of AI be limited and controlled. To this end, a much-discussed Open Letter was released this week. The letter urges all AI laboratories to temporarily halt, for at least six months, the training of any AI systems that are more advanced than GPT-4 . GPT-4, OpenAI's most advanced language model yet, was unveiled on 14 March, 2023. At the time o...