AI: In the Past and Present

Written and Edited

By Liam Teltow

This is an image I created using Deep.AI.

he world is quickly transferring to the online world. Everything is connected. With the complete takeover of the digital world, there is more demand than ever for advanced technology. One of the main avenues that the world is pursuing is AI. We can already do a vast amount of things, and it will only continue improving.

AI is a rapidly growing type of technology. With the introduction of the best language model right now, ChatGPT, people are beginning to see first-hand how powerful this field will become, and how futuristic the technology is right now. AIs like ChatGPT are being used in many school settings, prompting people to question what it will look like in the future.

Kevin Baragona, founder of one of the biggest AI companies in the scene right now, DeepAI, was one of the first people to understand how powerful artificial intelligence was going to be. He grew his company “bit by bit” until it was one of the largest in the field, and kept it there.

Courtesy of Forbes.

“Well, I started in 2016 as a hobbyist and I knew that deep learning was going to be the most transformational technology of our time. It was clear even then,” said Baragona. There are also companies that are trying to limit the usage of AI in schools so that teachers know that the students are doing their own work, not copying from an AI like ChatGPT. Their goal is to make you learn something, and getting an AI to do everything for you doesn’t help. Andrew Rains is the founder of one of the companies, called Passed.AI. “So you can take a block of texts, whether it’s a word file or a Google Doc or copy and paste, put it through that scanner and we will give our originality rating that will give a probability score on whether or not this was generated by AI or if it was human generated,” explained Rains. This type of AI isn’t completely perfect though, and will be harder and harder to detect as the technology grows.

Therefore, the technology for detecting cheating is also going to evolve, so it is a constant race to see what will flourish sooner.

“It’s not an exact science, there are some potential for false positives there,” commented Rains, “but it’ll give the user a rough idea of whether this model that we are using thinks that AI generated the text that has been put through it”.

Angelo Randazzo, a graduate from the University of Dallas at Texas, believes that some things in the future may be easier than we think. He said that it is only easier because of the progress we have already made. We will keep improving and innovating.

“To do it from scratch obviously is very difficult. But with today’s modern coding era, especially with the advent of Python’s usability and all the different open source projects out there, it’s very easy if you know a little bit of code to start being able to play around with this stuff pretty quickly,” said

Randazzo. Randazzo also tells us about the challenges that programmers face when creating extremely powerful AIs. Although it is easy to do some things, not everything is that simple. Even if it is simple, that doesn’t mean it is easy and can currently be done.

“To make something truly powerful that’s like what we think about in terms of Terminator movies with the AIs sentient almost, and is learning everything is actually very difficult,” said Randazzo. There are certain things that these computers are very good at, even right now, but there is a reason they aren’t good at everything. Angelo Randazzo believes that it isn’t hard to make something that can do a wide array of things, it is just time consuming. You would have to feed the machine so many data points and references that it isn’t viable. It may become easier to input vast amounts of information when other technologies are invented. “Machines, code and computers are very good at doing what you tell them and are not very good at not doing what you tell them,” explains Randazzo.

For that reason, some jobs may be safe for longer than others. Nothing is completely safe, and even now we have robots that can walk and move around just like us, but they will last longer.

“Well in the short term, physical labor is completely safe. How much longer? I don’t know. I don’t think it’s truly safe,” said Baragona.

The biggest AI currently is called ChatGPT 3. It is a language model, something that can take whatever you type in and do that thing. For example, you can ask it, “write me an essay about why a hotdog is a sandwich”, and ChatGPT will give you a complete essay about it. This is revolutionary, introducing AI into everyday lives.

Baragona talked about the general technology. He told me that this could be a very disastrous thing in the future, or it could continue improving lives.

“It’ll be like creating the nuclear weapons of software, that’s too hot to handle”, said Baragona.

There will be jobs for us, like fixing the Internet, Randazzo told me. He thinks that people will be replaced in most of our current jobs, but that will create more new jobs for us.

“And every industry… will kind of need at least a little bit of human connection”, Randazzo claimed.

This is another image I created using Deep.AI.

Baragona talked about how far we might go with this technology. Most interviewees talked about how it might progress in their fields, but

He also thinks that there are financial reasons why people wouldn’t want to stop it; All of the interviewees said that AI is something that will be used in many different industries in the future.

“The financial incentive to create it is far too strong”, said Baragona, “it goes against capitalism to try to stop AI. I don’t see that happening in today’s world at all”.

Although AI will be essential in every type of job in the future, Randazzo believes that humans will still be needed.

In conclusion, AI will be vital to our world. It will continue to grow and develop until it is used by everyone everywhere, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t have anything to do. There are many crucial things that only humans can give each other. This is a good thing for the world, as long as we don’t go too far, which is a distinct risk. Nothing is written in stone, as Baragona said in his interview, and we don’t know what will happen, we only know that it will be exciting.