One year after the debut of ChatGPT created a global sensation, leaders of business, government and civil society said at the Reuters NEXT conference in New York that generative AI technology is still mostly in an experimental stage, with limited exceptions. While ChatGPT has enchanted consumers with its ability to generate everything from Shakespeare-style sonnets to student term papers, its propensity to “hallucinate” erroneous information has kept it from revolutionizing most areas of industry so far, they said. “What’s been a lesson, I think, is the gap between being able to do something somewhat and being able to do it well enough for a particular purpose,” said Anthony Aguirre, founder and executive director of the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit aimed at reducing catastrophic risks from advanced artificial intelligence. Aguirre cited self-driving cars as an example of a technology struggling to make the transition to full deployment. The cars “work at some level right now, but they’re not reliable enough to replace humans. That has turned out to be much, much harder than anticipated.” Sherry Marcus, director of applied science at Amazon’s AWS, said customers were at different stages of progress. “I’ve observed many generative AI applications that are in production while other customers are just beginning their journey.” One way generative AI was already being deployed widely, highlighted by speakers across industries, was to write computer code. On Microsoft’s Github, an online platform for storing code, about half of the programming was written using assistance from an AI tool called Copilot that automatically suggests lines of code, said Microsoft Corporate Vice President Lili Cheng.
Full story : Generative AI still mostly experimental, say executives.
