Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI toured the world cautioning the governments and public at large about the downside of AI, especially generative AI. Generative AI models that do Natural Language Processing are called Large Language Models (LLMs). Those models such as ChatGPT respond to a prompt or question to generate a string of words ( technically called tokens) sequentially in an autoregressive manner. Here each word contributes to the prompt to generate the next word. Thus we get an answer in an essay-like form, built word by word.
What is there under the hood an LLM? It is a very large ML model with specialised AI architecture called transformers with billions or trillions of computable parameters. This model is trained on large datasets drawn from Internet, books and Wikipedia. It is expensive to train the transformer model since there are trillions of mathematical operations. It involves specialised computer hardware called GPUs. The latest GPT version GPT-4 is larger in size and much more efficient.
Though very beneficial to mankind, there are some downsides. The model can generate large-scale misinformation in the form of fake news. These models do hallucinate despite all the safeguards. The information provided could be factually incorrect.
The models are large-sized. The underlying training process is probabilistic. It is not easy to know how these large models provide a particular output to a given input. There can be outputs which are not aligned with the objectives of its human designers. These are called the black box risks.
In technological evolution, what can be done, will be done. There would be more powerful LLMs. At the same time, research could be directed towards AI safety and alignment. The design should be transparent and fair.
AI has the potential to empower citizens. It is useful in educating people and can assist the general public in medical care. It will be able assist the legal system in India with a backlog of cases. Far from banning it, AI could be used as a change agent to transform the Indian society.