Yes, you read that right. Earlier today, OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman referred to ChatGPT as a “horrible product”. On The New York Times’ tech podcast, ‘Hard Fork’, Altman, referring to the frequent error messages on ChatGPT, said that people are just typing something and trying until they get it right on a site “that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t”. 

Altman is not the only one looking at ChatGPT with critical eyes. Tech geniuses and billionaire entrepreneurs have weighed in with their perspectives, and not all are impressed with the chatbot. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, in a recent interview with CNBC said, though ChatGPT is “impressive,” it can make “horrible mistakes by not knowing what humanness is”. He warns people that artificial intelligence can make grave mistakes due to the lack of human elements such as emotions and feelings. 

Wozniak explains how he had dedicated his life to studying the computer and believes that at no point will it “equal the brain”. He has always been initially negative towards human-made technology equating to nature. He spoke about a time when a machine beat a human at chess, and everyone exclaimed how “smart” it was, when it only followed methods different from a human brain. He goes on to explain his scepticism of AI technology in self-driving cars too and says it can never replace human drivers. “It’s like you’re driving a car, and you know what other cars might be about to do because you know humans,” he said.   

Steve also believes that AI is the ultimate goal of computer technology, where it “follows procedures to learn things”, and that no human can reach the level of memorising where AI scans things a billion times a second. 

Misinformation and fake news

American billionaire and entrepreneur Mark Cuban believes that AI platforms like ChatGPT could exacerbate the spread of fake news on social media. In a podcast episode with Jon Steward, Cuban said that despite having human moderators on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, misinformation is widely spread, and this is a result of placing decision-making powers to it. Therefore, giving immense power to computers is not desirable. He said that once these machines start functioning independently, it will become difficult to define why and how it makes certain decisions and who controls them. 

Cuban also said that, as AI chatbots are still in the early stages of adoption, problems encountered around misinformation will not be identified by the older generation, including GenX. On the other hand, Gen Z and younger generations are better equipped to block out such information.

In an interview with a German newspaper, Google’s senior VP and search engine head Prabhakar Raghavan said that artificial intelligence can lead to“hallucinations” where AI technology can end up giving convincing but fictitious answers. Hallucinations result from errors in encoding and decoding between text and hallucinations. However, Prabhakar’s statement comes at a time when Google’s Bard goofed up a simple query, resulting in the company losing $100 billion of market value. 

Disrupting the Education System

Ninety-four-year-old American intellectual and cognitive scientist Noam Chomsky describes ChatGPT as “high-tech plagiarism” while talking to YouTube channel EduKitchen. Chomsky highlighted the difficulties ChatGPT poses in the education sector. Professors use plagiarism softwares, but with ChatGPT, there is no way to detect if students’ articles are plagiarised. However, he does say that technological disruptions have their negatives and positives. He talks about how students are adopting high technology to avoid learning, which is an indicator of a failing education system. If the education system doesn’t challenge or interest the students, they will find ways to opt-out. 

The Optimists 

American magnate and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, meanwhile, has a positive take on AI and ChatGPT. As per a report by Reuters (attributed to German newspaper Handelsblatt), Bill Gates calls ChatGPT something that will “change the world”.  He believes that ChatGPT kind of programs will reinvent the way we work and that office work will get easier. Until now, the challenge for AI was that it could only “read and write”, which has changed now. With AI understanding content, office jobs can get productive, and this program can be used for tasks such as letter and invoice writing. 

American billionaire, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, calls ChatGPT the “iPhone moment of AI”. In an informal chat with Berkeley Haas University, Huang said that ChatGPT is one of the “greatest things done in computing”. Comparing the moment to an iPhone revolution, he said ChatGPT has “democratised computing in a large way”. Side-stepping the fact that ChatGPT currently runs 10K Nvidia training GPUs with scope for more, making it one of the biggest gainers, Huang has highlighted how ChatGPT can help you irrespective of the industry you are working in. “It can do something for you. It can automate something for you,” he said. 

With everyone sharing their two cents about ChatGPT, there will always be two sides to the coin. However, it is too soon to seal the fate of a developing AI platform, but considering how companies are running the AI chatbot race, technology and business influencers like Steve Wozniak and Mark Cuban’s statements can come as a damper.