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How OpenAI is battling reduced human users on ChatGPT

This illustration picture shows the AI (Artificial Intelligence) smartphone app ChatGPT surrounded by other AI Apps in Vaasa, on June 6, 2023. PHOTO | AFP)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to the imitation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence. This field involves computer science that comprises machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision and robotics among others.

AI technology can be used in healthcare, finance, transportation, manufacturing, education and entertainment. This is because it has the potential of being automated to do routine tasks, enhance decision making processes, fine tune data analysis and insights as well as create new opportunities for innovation and problem solving.

OpenAI, a technological company owned by a group of investors, is the company that developed ChtGPT, an AI system that burst on the scene last year and attracted millions of users globally. By May 2023, ChatGPT had more than 100 million users globally.

ChatGPT is the AI that sparked off a race by other tech companies, including Google, to launch rival AI systems but it took them a while to catch up with ChatGPT.

However, reports are now emerging that ChatGPT is losing its subscribers in droves. According to the Washington Post, ChatGPT saw its first dip in human users in June 2023, and the AI lost about 10% global users.

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Similarweb, a web analytics and market intelligence firm, had initially noted that ChatGPT enjoyed traffic explosion and a meteoric engagement rate but beginning March 2023, a decline in users began being noted.

People were spending less time on ChatGPT amid claims that AI could destroy the lives of humans by taking over various job functions. Education institutions also began carrying out plagiarism checks for work produced by the AI in light of students being the largest number of users.

To counter this loss of human traffic, OpenAI set up a new team to steer and control AI systems that are smarter than humans.

“Super intelligence will be the most impactful technology humanity has ever invented, and could help us solve many of the world’s most important problems. But the vast power of super intelligence could also be very dangerous, and could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction. While super intelligence seems far off now, we believe it could arrive this decade. Currently, we don’t have a solution for steering or controlling a potentially super intelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue,” said OpenAI earlier this month.

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“Our current techniques for aligning AI, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, rely on humans’ ability to supervise AI. But humans won’t be able to reliably supervise AI systems much smarter than us; and so our current alignment techniques will not scale to super intelligence. We need new scientific and technical breakthroughs. Our goal is to build a roughly human-level automated alignment researcher. We are assembling a team of top machine learning researchers and engineers to work on this problem.

“This new team’s work is in addition to existing work at OpenAI aimed at improving the safety of current models like ChatGPT, as well as understanding and mitigating other risks from AI such as misuse, economic disruption, disinformation, bias and discrimination, addiction and overreliance, and others.

“While this new team will focus on the machine learning challenges of aligning super intelligent AI systems with human intent, there are related sociotechnical problems on which we are actively engaging with interdisciplinary experts to make sure our technical solutions consider broader human and societal concerns,” said OpenAI.

OpenAI further said they intended to solve the core technical challenges of superintelligence alignment in four years.

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