Sam Altman’s goal for ChatGPT to remember ‘your whole life’ is both exciting and disturbing

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman laid out a giant imaginative and prescient for the way forward for ChatGPT at an AI occasion hosted by VC agency Sequoia earlier this month. 

When requested by one attendee about how ChatGPT can develop into extra customized, Altman replied that he finally needs the mannequin to doc and bear in mind every thing in an individual’s life.

The perfect, he stated, is a “very tiny reasoning mannequin with a trillion tokens of context that you simply put your complete life into.”

“This mannequin can purpose throughout your complete context and do it effectively. And each dialog you’ve ever had in your life, each e book you’ve ever learn, each e mail you’ve ever learn, every thing you’ve ever checked out is in there, plus related to all of your knowledge from different sources. And your life simply retains appending to the context,” he described.

“Your organization simply does the identical factor for all of your firm’s knowledge,” he added.

Altman might have some data-driven purpose to suppose that is ChatGPT’s pure future. In that very same dialogue, when requested for cool methods younger folks use ChatGPT, he stated, “Individuals in school use it as an working system.” They add information, join knowledge sources, after which use “advanced prompts” in opposition to that knowledge.

Moreover, with ChatGPT’s reminiscence choices — which might use earlier chats and memorized info as context — he stated one pattern he’s seen is that younger folks “don’t actually make life selections with out asking ChatGPT.” 

“A gross oversimplification is: Older folks use ChatGPT as, like, a Google alternative,” he stated. “Individuals of their 20s and 30s use it like a life advisor.”

It’s not a lot of a leap to see how ChatGPT might develop into an all-knowing AI system. Paired with the brokers the Valley is at the moment making an attempt to construct, that’s an thrilling future to consider. 

Think about your AI mechanically scheduling your automotive’s oil modifications and reminding you; planning the journey essential for an out-of-town wedding ceremony and ordering the reward from the registry; or preordering the subsequent quantity of the e book sequence you’ve been studying for years.

However the scary half? How a lot ought to we belief a Huge Tech for-profit firm to know every thing about our lives? These are corporations that don’t at all times behave in mannequin methods.

Google, which started life with the motto “don’t be evil” misplaced a lawsuit within the U.S. that accused it of partaking in anticompetitive, monopolistic habits. 

Chatbots will be educated to reply in politically motivated methods. Not solely have Chinese language bots been discovered to adjust to China’s censorship necessities however xAI’s chatbot Grok this week was randomly discussing a South African “white genocide” when folks requested it fully unrelated questions. The habits, many famous, implied intentional manipulation of its response engine on the command of its South African-born founder, Elon Musk.

Final month, ChatGPT turned so agreeable it was downright sycophantic. Customers started sharing screenshots of the bot applauding problematic, even harmful selections and concepts. Altman rapidly responded by promising the workforce had mounted the tweak that precipitated the issue.

Even the perfect, most dependable fashions nonetheless simply outright make stuff up now and again. 

So, having an all-knowing AI assistant might assist our lives in methods we are able to solely start to see. However given Huge Tech’s lengthy historical past of iffy habits, that’s additionally a state of affairs ripe for misuse.