Steve Blank: AI Opens Pandora’s Box

The recent article by Steve Blank has an ominous start:

Humans have mastered lots of things that have transformed our lives, created our civilizations, and might ultimately kill us all. This year we’ve invented one more.

Blank then goes on to elaborate on how Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a technology anticipated for many years and how AI apps have recently become transformative and useful tools. He mentions several examples of such tools, including Dall-E, Github Copilot, AlphaFold, and ChatGPT 3.5. Blank notes that people thought the next versions of these tools would be incremental improvements, but the introduction of ChatGPT-4 this year has been a game-changer. He believes that ChatGPT-4 has the potential to have a significant impact on society, equivalent to explosives, mass communication, computers, recombinant DNA/CRISPR, and nuclear weapons, all rolled into one application. The article encourages readers to try ChatGPT-4 for themselves. And then he punctuates with:

We were very, very wrong.

At first blush ChatGPT is an extremely smart conversationalist (and homework writer and test taker). However, this the first time ever that a software program has become human-competitive at multiple general tasks. (Look at the links and realize there’s no going back.) This level of performance was completely unexpected. Even by its creators.