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 grow to be extra customized, Altman replied that he ultimately desires the mannequin to doc and keep in mind all the pieces in an individual’s life.

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

“This mannequin can cause throughout your complete context and do it effectively. And each dialog you’ve ever had in your life, each e book you’ve ever learn, each electronic mail you’ve ever learn, all the pieces you’ve ever checked out is in there, plus related 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 might have some data-driven cause to assume that is ChatGPT’s pure future. In that very same dialogue, when requested for cool methods younger individuals use ChatGPT, he stated, “Folks in school use it as an working system.” They add recordsdata, join information sources, after which use “advanced prompts” towards that information.

Moreover, with ChatGPT’s memory options — which might use earlier chats and memorized info as context — he stated one pattern he’s seen is that younger individuals “don’t actually make life choices with out asking ChatGPT.” 

“A gross oversimplification is: older individuals use ChatGPT as, like, a Google substitute,” he stated. “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 grow to be 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 mechanically scheduling your automotive’s oil modifications and reminding you; planning the journey crucial for an out-of-town marriage ceremony and ordering the present from the registry; or pre-ordering the subsequent quantity of the e book collection 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 all the pieces about our lives? These are corporations that don’t all the time 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 might 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 turned 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 fastened the tweak that prompted the issue.

Even the perfect, 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 large tech’s lengthy historical past of iffy habits, that’s additionally a scenario ripe for misuse.