First, they’re programmed for particular duties. (Examples that OpenAI created embody “Artistic Writing Coach” and “Mocktail Mixologist,” a bot that implies nonalcoholic drink recipes.) Second, the bots can pull from non-public knowledge, reminiscent of an organization’s inner H.R. paperwork or a database of actual property listings, and incorporate that knowledge into their responses. Third, in the event you allow them to, the bots can plug into different components of your on-line life — your calendar, your to-do checklist, your Slack account — and take actions utilizing your credentials.
Sound scary? It’s, in the event you ask some A.I. security researchers, who worry that giving bots extra autonomy might result in catastrophe. The Heart for AI Security, a nonprofit analysis group, listed autonomous brokers as one in every of its “catastrophic A.I. risks” this yr, saying that “malicious actors might deliberately create rogue A.I.s with harmful objectives.”
However there may be cash to be made in A.I. assistants that may do helpful duties for folks, and company prospects have been itching to coach chatbots on their very own knowledge. There’s additionally an argument that A.I. received’t really be helpful till it actually understands its customers — their communication types, their likes and dislikes, what they take a look at and store for on-line.
So right here we’re, rushing into the age of the autonomous A.I. agent — doomers be damned.
To be honest, OpenAI’s bots aren’t notably harmful. I received a demo of a number of GPTs through the firm’s developer convention in San Francisco on Monday, they usually largely automated innocent duties like creating coloring pages for kids, or explaining the principles of card video games.
Customized GPTs can also’t actually do a lot but, past looking out via paperwork and plugging into widespread apps. One demo I noticed on Monday concerned an OpenAI worker asking a GPT to lookup conflicting conferences on her Google calendar and ship a Slack message to her boss. One other occurred onstage when Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief govt, constructed a “start-up mentor” chatbot to present recommendation to aspiring founders, primarily based on an uploaded file of a speech he had given years earlier.
