Artificial intelligence is a thing we keep hearing more and more about, but what are we really talking about? Is it really something smart and intelligent. It is certainly smart, but sadly the intelligent part still needs to be created.

A few years ago we had various very good search engine. You could give it a couple of words, and it would use those words to really quickly give a list of results that were related to the words you provided. They improved this search by remembering where people clicked. More clicks meant a result was probable better, so it got a bit higher score.

Now OpenAI has added a new layer to this. It’s tool ChatGPT can understand text, and can tell you something in a natural fashion. You can ask it a question, and it will give you an answer back, just like a normal conversation. Understanding someone is a very complex task. You can ask the same thing in lots of different ways, and small details can be very important or meaningless. The ‘engine’ is trained to know what is important, and what is not. Instead of giving you a list of sites, now you can simply get a summary as an answer. The AI is not storing a huge amount of links, it is reading everything, and storing the information it finds, which is what it uses to answer your question.

We are not there yet, but it is a huge step forward. Understanding language is really difficult, and making it seem ‘natural’ is very hard, but it looks like they really achieved something here. Still, there is no intelligence. For now there is no curiosity, no initiative, no desire. The AI only responds to queries. It remembers what you asked it, but thats it. You can ask it things, and it can tell you things, but it won’t do anything else. It is really good, and clearly the current ‘AI’ is much much better then the ‘old’ search engines.

We can even ask it directly.