“AI is the New Electricity”

by

Professor Worsak Kanok-Nukulchai, Ph.D.

Fellow of the Royal Society of Thailand

Executive Director of Chulalongkorn School of Integrated Innovation

ChatGPT marks the beginning of a new era in artificial intelligence technology, significantly impacting human lifestyle transformation across education, learning, and work. ChatGPT serves as a communication platform between humans and GPT, a large language model trained on an extensive array of data from websites, books, articles, and other online sources worldwide. Functioning as a personal assistant, ChatGPT empowers individuals to perform various tasks in personal, educational, and professional settings. The launch of ChatGPT is considered a “game-changer” since it represents the first time AI technology has been made widely available, allowing the general public to benefit from this groundbreaking innovation.

AI is no longer distant or restricted to elite scholars

For a long time, most people thought of artificial intelligence (AI) as something distant and relevant only for certain groups. But last year, for the first time, AI became available to everyone. This new AI technology, called ChatGPT, can talk to us and learn like humans. It can also give us advice on many topics.

ChatGPT is now widely known around the world. It is a chatbot that can talk to people and provide them with news and information. ChatGPT started with the GPT-3.5 model and now uses GPT-4, which learns from vast amounts of language data found on the internet. It’s designed to talk to people in a natural way.

To demonstrate the intelligence of ChatGPT, it was tested using the LSAT exam, a crucial requirement for admission to prestigious US law schools. ChatGPT-3.5 scored 143, reaching the 40th percentile, while ChatGPT-4 achieved 163, reaching the 88th percentile and meeting the criteria for the top 20 law schools.

ChatGPT 3.5 and 4.0 also underwent evaluation with the SAT, a globally recognized standardized test for university admissions, including Thailand. Their scores were 670 and 710 for SAT English and 590 and 700 for SAT Math, respectively. Although the English scores were commendable, the Math scores were less impressive. For context, ChatGPT-4’s Math score was lower than the average SAT Math score of 740 achieved by students admitted to the Chulalongkorn School of Integrated Innovation’s Bachelor of Arts and Science Program in Integrated Innovation (BAScii).

This highlights the importance of understanding ChatGPT’s strengths and limitations and how it can be effectively integrated into education. Despite its impressive capabilities, it is important to recognize that rather than “knowing” the answers, ChatGPT relies on a pre-trained dataset to make predictions. It is also quite concerning that in cases where the answer was incorrect (Figure 1), ChatGPT confidently provided the same mistake time after time.

ChatGPT: The First AI Tool For The Masses

Designed with accessibility and versatility in mind, ChatGPT caters to a broad range of users and applications by breaking down the barriers that once limited AI technology to a select few. As an innovative solution, it holds major potential for transforming everyday tasks and revolutionizing industries, with education being a prime example.

As shown in Figure 2, ChatGPT has a wide range of applications in daily life, making it a versatile tool for various tasks. However, it is essential to be cautious about its limitations, including ambiguity issues, limited specific knowledge, and potential biases, as also outlined in the figure.

While ChatGPT offers numerous benefits for everyday use, it can be especially advantageous in professional settings. In fact, many believe that ChatGPT will become an indispensable “key player” within organizations in the near future because it can perform a wide range of tasks, thereby enhancing the efficiency and speed of work for academics and professionals alike. These tasks include:

First, ChatGPT can act as a personal assistant, effectively summarizing document content, news articles, or webpages as well as functioning as a professional translator capable of translating between languages in mere moments. Second, it can draft letters and emails in English by following the main objectives and points provided by users. Content revisions and style adjustments can also be requested once the draft is ready. Third, it can function as an in-house English writer and can create professional-standard articles or reports on various topics. Four, it can assist with conducting SWOT analyses, which involves identifying Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats to provide valuable in-depth information required in decision-making for various projects. Five, it can act as a strategy developer by gathering important data related to the organization’s overall picture, which will serve as the foundation for monitoring, analyzing, and adjusting future strategies. Six, ChatGPT can function as a resident futurist, providing information on trends and projections to help organizations consistently move in the right direction. Lastly, ChatGPT can serve as an in-house programmer capable of writing and developing computer code for internal use as well as maintain and update software in order to stay current. Given these various capabilities, ChatGPT is an essential tool that can assist professionals in their daily work.

A significant impact of AI will be on education and the way we learn and teach, an issue we will deal with in the second part of this article.

Conclusion

Today’s ChatGPT milestone marks the pioneering translation of AI research into everyday public use, echoing the historical moment when electricity was first introduced to the masses. Dr. Andrew Ng, an AI expert and adjunct professor at Stanford University, famously stated in 2007 that “AI is the new electricity.” He suggested that over the next century, AI will revolutionize human societies more profoundly than the discovery of electricity did in the previous century-and-a-half. Thus, rather than being apprehensive, Thai society should embrace the opportunity to learn how to harness this “new electricity.” A consensus among AI experts suggests that we are merely at the beginning of an extraordinary journey. As AI technologies like ChatGPT become publicly accessible, the countdown to significant societal transformations has commenced, with past predictions about AI’s wonders and challenges gradually materializing.

This is the first part of a two-article series on ChatGPT. The second part is titled “ChatGPT: The AI Era Has Finally Arrived-Rethinking Education with ChatGPT”. It can be read at this LINK: https://medium.com/@WorsakKanokNukulchai/chatgpt-the-ai-era-has-finally-arrived-ii-cdb26bec29e9