Sam Altman’s goal for ChatGPT to remember ‘your whole life’ is both exciting and disturbing

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman laid out a giant imaginative and prescient for the way forward for ChatGPT at an AI occasion hosted by VC agency Sequoia earlier this month. 

When requested by one attendee about how ChatGPT can develop into extra personalised, Altman replied that he ultimately needs the mannequin to doc and keep in mind every part in an individual’s life.

The best, he mentioned, is a “very tiny reasoning mannequin with a trillion tokens of context that you just put your complete life into.”

“This mannequin can motive throughout your complete context and do it effectively. And each dialog you’ve ever had in your life, each ebook you’ve ever learn, each electronic mail you’ve ever learn, every part you’ve ever checked out is in there, plus linked to all of your information from different sources. And your life simply retains appending to the context,” he described.

“Your organization simply does the identical factor for all of your firm’s information,” he added.

Altman could have some data-driven motive to assume that is ChatGPT’s pure future. In that very same dialogue, when requested for cool methods younger individuals use ChatGPT, he mentioned, “Folks in faculty use it as an working system.” They add recordsdata, join information sources, after which use “complicated prompts” towards that information.

Moreover, with ChatGPT’s memory options — which may use earlier chats and memorized details as context — he mentioned one development he’s observed is that younger individuals “don’t actually make life selections with out asking ChatGPT.” 

“A gross oversimplification is: Older individuals use ChatGPT as, like, a Google substitute,” he mentioned. “Folks of their 20s and 30s use it like a life advisor.”

It’s not a lot of a leap to see how ChatGPT may develop into an all-knowing AI system. Paired with the brokers the Valley is at present making an attempt to construct, that’s an thrilling future to consider. 

Think about your AI routinely scheduling your automobile’s oil adjustments and reminding you; planning the journey needed for an out-of-town marriage ceremony and ordering the present from the registry; or preordering the following quantity of the ebook sequence you’ve been studying for years.

However the scary half? How a lot ought to we belief a Huge Tech for-profit firm to know every part about our lives? These are firms that don’t at all times behave in mannequin methods.

Google, which started life with the motto “don’t be evil” lost a lawsuit in the U.S. that accused it of participating in anticompetitive, monopolistic habits. 

Chatbots may be skilled to reply in politically motivated methods. Not solely have Chinese language bots been discovered to comply with China’s censorship requirements however xAI’s chatbot Grok this week was randomly discussing a South African “white genocide” when individuals requested it utterly unrelated questions. The habits, many noted, implied intentional manipulation of its response engine on the command of its South African-born founder, Elon Musk.

Final month, ChatGPT grew to become so agreeable it was downright sycophantic. Customers started sharing screenshots of the bot applauding problematic, even dangerous decisions and ideas. Altman shortly responded by promising the staff had mounted the tweak that precipitated the issue.

Even one of the best, most dependable fashions nonetheless simply outright make stuff up from time to time. 

So, having an all-knowing AI assistant may assist our lives in methods we will solely start to see. However given Huge Tech’s lengthy historical past of iffy habits, that’s additionally a state of affairs ripe for misuse.