Antoine Trzoska

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It has been almost two years since OpenAI released ChatGPT 3.5 in November 2022. According to the latest Gartner Hype Cycle from last month [1], Generative AI is over the peak of inflated expectations. I have to agree, as it turns out that ChatGPT and other LLMs have just become an easier form of googling, but with additional risks, disappointments and frustrations.

First of all, the common misconception that I often see from people with a less technical background is that they believe LLMs are telling the truth. No, it is trained with a large amount of data and tries to connect your prompt with the statistically most likely outcome. To give you an example, if you type in “Second World”. The most likely output you will get is “War”. This was also an issue back in 2022, as students started to copy what ChatGPT was outputting for their assignments without checking if the sources were actually real and if the output actually made sense.

Now, 2 years later, there have not been really major improvements. If you give ChatGPT a list of tasks to do, it tends to forget what the first task was. If you ask ChatGPT to give you sources for the text that it outputs, it will now give you actual sources that exist, but if you check the content of these pages you see that it does not match at all. But to be not overly negative, I used ChatGPT for coding in the past, and it sometimes does give decent feedback, but it probably would have been quicker for me if I just googled it myself. Something that LLMs also have helped me with is rewriting my own text in a more clear manner, as well as summarizing pdfs with ChatPDF. In case you did not know about ChatPDF, you just upload your pdf and start asking questions [2].

What I am actually impressed about is the generation of images and videos. I have used Bing Image Creator in the past for creating images about my mood or visualizing my thoughts and I have to say that it does a pretty accurate job. While for video generation OpenAI’s “Sora” has not been released yet, I was amazed about one example [3] that you can see below.

Source: OpenAI. Prompt: Reflections in the window of a train traveling through the Tokyo suburbs.

References:

[1] Gartner.: Gartner 2024 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies Highlights Developer Productivity, Total Experience, AI and Security. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-08-21-gartner-2024-hype-cycle-for-emerging-technologies-highlights-developer-productivity-total-experience-ai-and-security (2024)

[2] https://www.chatpdf.com/

[3] OpenAI.: Train Window. https://vimeo.com/913132696/e459e90255 (2024)

Featured image created with Bing Image Creator

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The title of this blog was inspired by me googling about the Metaverse (after watching Zuckerberg’s video about his vision on this matter) and coming across an article in Harvard Business Review with the title “Yes, the Metaverse is still happening” [1]. I do not believe that the Metaverse will ever be a thing. Sure, the article mentions the concept of a Digital Twin, which is a digital copy of a real object [2], and that enterprises are adopting Digital Twins. But I think there is a big gap between companies leveraging Digital Twins for their products or processes, and consumers spending their time in a Metaverse.

Source: Facebook/Mark Zuckerberg in Horizon Worlds

At the moment, it is just not impressive at all. Just look at Meta’s “Horizon Worlds” [3], the graphics quality is from like a videogame in the Playstation 2 era. If these companies really want people to spend their time in a virtual world, I believe it has to look and feel almost like real-life. I expect that it will take a very long time before we have the computational power that is affordable, capable of handling billions of people in a virtual world and make it not look like it was made in 2006.

Moving aside from if the Metaverse will be possible hardware wise, I have not even mentioned the usability and privacy of the Metaverse. Do we really want to sit for hours with a display mounted on our head? Surely it must get tiring. And what about our privacy? Are we willing to let companies track where and with whom we interact? Can we really trust Meta with that stuff looking at their past behavior? As you can read, there are a lot of ifs and buts about the Metaverse and I believe it will take a while before we see something like the movie ‘Ready Player One’.

References:

[1] Piscione, D. P., Drean, J.: Yes the metaverse is still happening. Harvard Business Review. (2023)

[2] Ray, P., Surianarayanan, C.: Chapter Twelve – Digital twin: The industry use cases. Advances in Computers. vol. 117. pp. 285-320. (2020)

[3] https://horizon.meta.com/

Featured image created with Bing Image Creator

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