‘Why is AI booming?’ What can it make?’ Unexpectedly unknown topics in the field. --AI Engineer

Generative AI technology, as represented by ChatGPT, has recently attracted a lot of attention. This is because generative AI is capable of various creative expressions, such as illustrations, programmes and 3D models, as well as text.

What changes will be made to our lives and businesses as a result of generative AI, which is said to be ‘taking many people's jobs’?

Today, I would like to ask you a number of questions about AI technologies that have been the talk of the town recently. To begin with, why has AI become such a hot topic in the last few months or so?

B: The trigger was the release of image-generating AI services such as ‘Midjo urney’ and ‘Stable Diffusion’ in July and August 2022. These services were able to automatically generate appropriate images by entering a few keywords.

This is an innovative service that allows people who cannot draw at all to create images in seconds that look as if they were drawn by a professional. However, I have the impression that these image-generating AI services attracted attention from a small group of people who were interested in IT technology.

It was probably from the service ChatGPT, released in November last year, that this became more widespread. This service became a hot topic because it was able to answer questions given by users in natural sentences, as if they were created by a human being.

ChatGPT quickly became used around the world, and in January this year it announced that it had 100 million monthly active users.

A: Since then, generative AI services have been launched one after another all over the world. Recently, search engine providers have successively released services that utilise generative AI.

Microsoft has released the ‘New Bing’ based on the large-scale language model ‘GPT-4’, which is the technology behind ChatGPT, and Google has released ‘Bard’. Both generate answers to user questions based on internet searches.

B: What is booming now is not so much ‘AI technology’ as ‘generative AI technology’ - AI technology has already been developed for decades, and many people have heard in the past that ‘AI will surpass humans’.

For example, AI technology was already developed to look at images and analyse the information. There have also been several other systems that have emerged, such as Shogi AI, that can outperform humans in certain fields.

This is booming in 2023 because AI is now able to generate things that are as good as or better than humans. AI is now entering fields that were previously regarded as ‘creative activities that only humans can do’, such as writing, images, and even novels, programming, 3D models and music.

Until now, AI technology has been good at recognising data, but not at outputting it at the same level as humans. In particular, natural language processing, or the creation of natural sentences like those produced by humans, was a difficult task for AI. However, the Transformer technology has made this possible.

This technology was originally published as a paper by Google in the course of its research into translation, but it has been applied to AI, resulting in a generative AI service that produces sentences that look like they were written by a human.

When ChatGPT became a hot topic, I asked a few questions to try it out, and sometimes I got answers that were off the mark. Seeing that, I have the impression that even though it is AI, it makes mistakes and is not very reliable.

A: Text generation AI such as ChatGPT is a technology that learns from large amounts of text data and generates ‘expected appropriate’ answers based on that. Therefore, if there is not enough training data on the content of the question, there is a possibility that the answer could be wrong.

In fact, in the case of ChatGPT, it learned data up to September 2021, so it sometimes gave completely wrong answers on current affairs that happened after 2022.

B: A common misconception about generative AI technology is that it can ‘tell you the right answers to things that humans don't know’. This is a misconception, as generative AI outputs based on the large amount of training data that already exists, so of course AI does not know about information that does not exist in the training data.

Incidentally, the problems of missing answers to questions and being out of touch with the latest current information are pretty much eliminated with ‘Bard’ and the ‘new Bing’, which answer based on the vast amount of search results on the internet.