13 September 2024

Is Artificial Intelligence The Next Easy-Money Bust? – OpEd

Justin Murray

Since early 2022, the big buzz in the tech industry, and among laymen in the general public, has been “artificial intelligence.” While the concept isn’t new—AI has been the term used to describe how computers play games since at least the 1980s—it’s once again captured the public’s imagination.

Before getting into the meat of the article, a brief primer is necessary. When talking about AI, it’s important to understand what is meant. AI can be broken down into seven broad categories. Most of the seven are, at best, hypothetical and do not exist. The type of AI everyone is interested in falls under the category of Limited Memory AI. These are where large language models (LLMs) reside. Since this isn’t a paper on the details, think of LLMs as complex statistical guessing machines. You type in a sentence and it will output something based on the loaded training data that statistically lines up with what you requested.

Based on this technology, LLMs can produce (at least on the surface) impressive results. For example, ask ChatGPT 4.0 (the latest version at the time of writing) the following logic puzzle:

This is a party: {}

This is a jumping bean: B

The jumping bean wants to go to the party.

It will output, with some word flair, {B}. Impressive, right? It can do this same thing no matter what two characters you use in the party and whatever character you desire to go to the party. This has been used as a demonstration of the power of artificial intelligence.

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