The introduction of ChatGPT in November 2022 made it one year old in 2023. It has been a ChatGPT based on large language model. (LLM). LLMs, as we know, are based on a seminal paper that was co-written by seven authors – Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez and Illia Sutskever. The paper was titled ‘Attention Is All You Need’. It was published in December 2017 (Google).

LLMs use transformer architecture. ChatGPT has user-friendly conversational interface to the underlying LLM GPT-3.5. It generated content and initiated generative AI. Gen AI caused a global stir, unlike anything since the iPhone’s debut. It acquired a million users in five days of its launch. At present, it has hundreds of millions of users. A series of similar bots too appeared in the market from different organizations, the most recent being Amazon Q.

The technology had a profound effect on creative and knowledge-based work. It reduced the time taken to generate content by a significant percentage and enhanced the output quality a great deal.

The technology was put on par with electricity and fire considering its tremendous transformative power. McKinsey estimates an addition of $4 trillion a year to the global economy.

There are issues about the safety of generative AI and it is a matter of discussion right from the US Congress to Bletchley Park resolution in the UK, and the debate has divided the world into two camps — those who want to speed up AI research and those who would like to go slow on it.

Some adore its potential to benefit mankind and some are ‘doomers’ who are concerned about the harm it can cause.

There are voices everywhere advocating regulation of AI.

The whole of 2023 could be considered a year of AI. In the midst of all this, OpenAI’s Board dismissed Sam Altman, the CEO but he was reinstated in less than a week after an employee threat of en masse attrition.

It has been rumoured in this context that a certain secretive project Q* — pronounced as Q-star — has been conceived at OpenAI days before Sam(uel) Altman was fired. The Board was informed about the project by the employees. It was a warning that Q* could be harmful to humanity. Perhaps, this could be attributed to the dismissal of the CEO. It is, however, a remote possibility, since Sutskever denies receiving any such letter.

Q* could have elaborated on new neuro-symbolic architecture. Such a system could enable an AI system to learn from less data, explaining behaviour and logic. This is a stepping stone to achieve ‘artificial general intelligence’ (AGI). Though ill-defined, AGI means information processing ability equalling a human being or even surpassing a human being, and exercised at machine speed.

Q* could be short of this breakthrough, but takes us closer to it. Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang says this is achievable in next five years. Microsoft’s president Brad Smith is not so optimistic about AGI. He feels it may take years and decades.

Both ChatGPT and Q* has given rise to speculation, apprehension, competition and regulation. The year that has gone by –2023 — is a milestone year and represents human quest for knowledge and mastery over the universe.

The coming years are going to be much more tumultuous. The path we chose to tread depends on the guidance the wizened in the field offer to us.