看了AI画的鱼香肉丝，网友愣住了......

就在过去这几个月里，以ChatGPT为典型的一类“善解人意”的AI忽然火了起来。这类AI的实用性特别高，能画画、能翻译句子、能写报告，最重要的是人指挥TA做这些事情都不用费心费力输入命令，只需要像聊天一样打字即可，不费劲。

AI

Zhou Xiao, an assistant professor at Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China, listed a few examples of AIs that people can use in daily life. There is the gaming AIs that can compete with humans playing games, such as AlphaGo developed by DeepMind around 2016, which features a search algorithm, deep neural networks and reinforcement learning.

至于最近大火的ChatGPT则是语言模型，通过多种人工智能技术和算法实现了对自然语言的理解和生成，从而能够与人类进行自然的对话交互，它的出现让人工智能强势地摘掉了“人工智障”的帽子。GPT的全称叫生成预训练转换器(Generative Pretrained Transformer)，复旦大学附属中山医院院长、中国科学院院士葛均波曾经很形象地解释过这三个词：

Generative是生成的意思，表示它区别于既往搜索引擎，能自己生成创作出新的内容；Pretrained是预先训练意思，表示它之前已经在一些数据库里经过训练过，已经具有一些自身逻辑及判断；Transformer是一种全新的算法架构，能够在处理长文本时更高效，训练时间更短。

“That algorithm works in a way like finding a point in a space,” Wang Jianshuo, founder and CEO of Baixing AI, a company building the basic infrastructure for a world that bots talk with bots, tried to explain how it works in plain language: “With three parameters one can locate a point in a 3-dimensional coordinate system. In human language one might need thousands of parameters to describe an object; For example an apple needs parameters such as edible, fruit, green or red in color, grown from a tree, generally smaller than 10 cms in diameter to be defined. The more parameters that can be defined, the more accurately AI can find the right point.”

Wang cited apples and bananas as two examples. With parameters such “edible”, “sweet” and “fruit”, neither humans nor an AI could distinguish them from each other. But with the parameter concerning the shape included, namely “long” or “round”, one could make a guess. With the parameter of the color being red, green or yellow, one could be surer about his/her judgment. “That’s also how GPT works — Most of the times it takes thousands of parameters for AI to define an object like we humans do,” he said: “we just do not realize that we are doing that.”

“It was based on the training of 45 Terabytes of data that ChatGPT made its breakthrough early this year, for which purpose it used about 285,000 CPUs and over 10,000 model A100 GPUs,” said Zhang Junping, a professor on computer technology at School of Computer Science, Fudan University, who stressed that the amount of data the language model involves is of key importance to AIs like GPT in an academic essay ChatGPT: Potentials, prospects, and limitations: “ChatGPT benefits mainly from Large Language Models(LLMs) that train huge neural network models with large-scale data using Language Models(LMs).”

For all three AIs of the type, a test sentence is input to “anlyze how Artifical Intelligenz works” with the spelling errors intentionally left uncorrected. All three neglected the errors as if they didn’t exist and just talked on.

AI

AI has already launched a revolution not only in the computer industry, but also in daily lives. In gaming, AIs have made major progress over the past half a decade, people now can play games such as chess or GO with smart AIs as opponents so as to sharpen their own skills. Image recognition AIs have also become mature, people could easily open a lock or pay for a deal by holding theirsmartphone in front of their face.Now with GPT making fast developments, the way people interact with computers might changeagain.

According to Chen Jing, a researcher at Fengyun Institute of Science, Technology and Strategy, computers still receive instructions and requests from human users in a way that is quite inefficient, via akeyboard and mouse, as the user must click on some icon or type in something to make the computer act as required. With speech recognition and face recognition AI technologiesimproving significantly in the 2010s, voice recognition became a newmeansof input.

The GPT-4 technology, released by Open AI on March 15, propels the process another step forward. Being able to recognize images in a more accurate, reliable way, the GPT-4 technology can understand humans in a more efficient way.

“Imagine that you are leaving home for office,” Chen said: “currently you have to turn off the lights and lock the door. With GPT-4, all you need is to wave goodbye to the camera at your gate, then the AI will understand you and turn off all unnecessary appliances, close the door and lock it for you. When you come home, just smile at the camera and it will wake everythingup. That’s not only because the AI can recognize your face based on the technology that became ripe around 2020, but also because it can understand your gestures and facial expressionsbased on GPT-4.”

AI

Not everybody is happy with AI’s growing abilities. “The images drawn by AI are soulless”, said Xi Li (pseudo name), a 41-year-old painter, with a little anger: “They can help humans, but never replace human hands.”

再比如，一位强烈要求匿名的科幻作者对AI写稿表示鄙视，认为AI不可能像人类一样把握各种词汇的运用。那怎么看“文无第一、武无第二”呢？这位作家表示同意这句话，但再三强调“AI写的小说抓不住读者的心”。

Similarly, a science fiction writer who hopes to stay anonymous said that AI can never write as good as professional writers do. “There is no yardstick to measure how good an essay is, but the ones written by AI just do not strike people in the heart.”

For Qu Xiaobo, a professor at the Institute of Population and Labor Economics and deputy director of the Human Resource Center, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences(CASS), that reflects people’s worries about their jobs being taken away by an AI. “Such concerns are understandable,” he said. “Even we professors worry about being replaced by AI professors.”

But Qu holds a positive attitude toward employment in the age of AI. “While taking jobs, AI creates new jobs, too,” he said. “Its general effect upon the market depends on how many jobs will disappear and how many will emerge. AI willtheoretically increase the Total Factor Productivity(TFP) of society, which means it should create more jobs than it replaces.”

If one searches “AI” on several domestic job websites, new jobs involving AI released for weeks even days such as “AI consultant”, “AI engineer”, “AI tutor” will emerge and cover almost tens of pages, with promised wages ranging from 15,000 to 30,000 yuan ($4,368) in Beijing, the capital with an average monthly salary around 15,000 yuan for 2022. Qu said these are the newly emerging jobs he refers to, as quite many are dealing with AI, or what he called “jobs for human-AI interactions”.

His view is echoed by Wang, who said that new jobs will be created with the fast development of AI. “Actually with every major technological progress new jobs emerged,” he said. “With the invention of automobiles there was the need for drivers, while with the invention of planes we got pilots, and people’s general living standards have been increasing with these progresses because the general productivity of society was increased. The faster AI progresses, the easier life for people will be.”

However, for individuals, how to keep one’s job remains a challenge because possibly not everyone has the skills needed for the new jobs. Qu said that phenomenon has an academic term “structural mismatch”. But he added that’s not unique to AI,but has been a common occurrence throughouthistory because technology progresses all the time. The current difficulties for college graduates to find jobs, he said, are also partly the result of a “structural mismatch”. To solve that, individuals need to keep learning new things so as to both have experiences and skills. Qu also stressed the State’s role in providing employees with better training so that they can constantly update their skills to meet the changes in the job market.

AI is smart, but the inability to pursue happiness is an uncrossable line that distinguishes humans from AI, so far at least.

The word might sound too high-tone, but almost every major technological progress has been the outcome of people’s pursuit of a better life. People wanted to travel over the sea, so they invented the canoe, boats and ships. People wanted to save the trouble of walking on foot, so they invented the train and automobiles. People wanted to fly in the sky and to the moon, so they invented the airplane and the rocket. To a great degree, it is our ancestors’ pursuit of a better, more convenient life that has shaped how we live today.

But that’s exactly what ChatGPT, or any other kind of AI, lacks. AI in essence is sequence of codes written by humans to make daily life better. AI does not have its own pursuit. It does not dream of improving the conditions for itself, which prevents it from progressing on its own. It has the potential of designing an airplane, but it will never do so unless given instruction to do so by a human, which makes its progress dependent on humans.

In a philosophical sense, the pursuit of a better life has been carried in the genes of every creature for 3.8 billion years, since the primal life came into being on this planet. Since that moment, each species has continually evolved so as to win the competition to survive. To be more accurate, the instinct to survive, to continue existing as a life is the original driving force of the pursuit of happiness, but AI, whether GPT and other AI technologies, lack that driving force. They are merely long sequences of code that people write to make human lives better, for which purpose their own existence is not important. After all, AI is with a history of only decades, while that of life is hundreds of millions years.

Talking about the question, Wang Jianshuosaid he once asked his AI the question about the meaning of life, which inspired the latter to think and think and think, answer and answer and answer, and for two whole days it had been explaining this. “Ultimately AI will gain the instinct to survive”, he said at last: “I trust these products we humans make and maybe all it needs is another five years or even shorter time span, but it might take longer time to implement it.”