The question of artificial intelligence has been a hard one to get away from, with ChatGPT hitting the headlines as both an amazing scientific advance and the harbinger of the end of civilization. Which is it? Well, as with many tech stories in the papers, it’s a bit more complicated than a simple binary choice.
What has been released to the public are still a long way from the AIs we’re used to seeing in science fiction. They’re generally capable of doing one thing, whether that’s holding a conversation or creating images of the Pope in a fashionable white coat (or the image that opens this feature) that are photoreal enough to fool the casual observer. We’ve yet to see one that can do both, though ChatGPT is as capable at writing in programming languages such as Python as it is in English or Spanish.
This is also a developing field, where advances come quickly and suddenly. The difference between ChatGPT 4 has been claimed to be ten times as complex as ChatGPT 3.5, despite there being only three months between their releases.
So what are these AIs? How do they work? Are they going to destroy the world?
