First, they’re programmed for particular duties. (Examples that OpenAI created embrace “Artistic Writing Coach” and “Mocktail Mixologist,” a bot that implies nonalcoholic drink recipes.) Second, the bots can pull from personal knowledge, equivalent to an organization’s inside H.R. paperwork or a database of actual property listings, and incorporate that knowledge into their responses. Third, in the event you allow them to, the bots can plug into different components of your on-line life — your calendar, your to-do checklist, your Slack account — and take actions utilizing your credentials.
Sound scary? It’s, in the event you ask some A.I. security researchers, who concern that giving bots extra autonomy may result in catastrophe. The Middle for AI Security, a nonprofit analysis group, listed autonomous brokers as one in every of its “catastrophic A.I. risks” this yr, saying that “malicious actors may deliberately create rogue A.I.s with harmful objectives.”
However there’s cash to be made in A.I. assistants that may do helpful duties for folks, and company clients have been itching to coach chatbots on their very own knowledge. There’s additionally an argument that A.I. received’t really be helpful till it actually understands its customers — their communication types, their likes and dislikes, what they have a look at and store for on-line.
So right here we’re, rushing into the age of the autonomous A.I. agent — doomers be damned.
To be honest, OpenAI’s bots aren’t significantly harmful. I received a demo of a number of GPTs in the course of the firm’s developer convention in San Francisco on Monday, they usually principally automated innocent duties like creating coloring pages for kids, or explaining the foundations of card video games.
Customized GPTs can also’t actually do a lot but, past looking out by way of paperwork and plugging into widespread apps. One demo I noticed on Monday concerned an OpenAI worker asking a GPT to lookup conflicting conferences on her Google calendar and ship a Slack message to her boss. One other occurred onstage when Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief govt, constructed a “start-up mentor” chatbot to present recommendation to aspiring founders, based mostly on an uploaded file of a speech he had given years earlier.
