Asia's richest man is 'addicted' to ChatGPT

Gautam Adani, the richest man in Asia, has found interest in natural language generation (NLG) platform ChatGPT. On the sidelines of the ongoing World Economic Forum (WEF) summit, Adani wrote on LinkedIn, that NLG was among the most discussed subjects at the event. He added that he himself is "addicted" to the platform, while also warning of its possible ramifications.  

ChatGPT is an NLG chatbot developed by American artificial intelligence (AI) research firm OpenAI. The chatbot is capable of writing prose, poetry, computer code and more, and has enthralled users all over the world since late last year.  

The businessman, who has in recent years diversified from mines, ports and power plants into airports, data centres and defence, posted on LinkedIn, “The recent release of ChatGPT (I must admit to some addiction since I started using it) is a transformational moment in the democratization of AI given its astounding capabilities as well as comical failures.”  

Recalling his thoughts from the Davos World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting, he wrote that “advancements in AI, or generative AI, was the buzzword at all the discussions at the WEF”.  

Adani further stated that “generative AI will have massive ramifications. “Nearly five decades ago, the pioneering of chip design and large-scale chip production put the US ahead of rest of the world and led to the rise of many partner countries and tech behemoths like Intel, Qualcomm, TSMC, etc. It also paved the way for precision and guided weapons used in modern warfare with more chips mounted than ever before,” he said. 

However he added, “Generative AI holds the same potential and dangers, and the race is already on, with China outnumbering the US in the number of most-cited scientific papers on AI.”  In fact, Chinese researchers in 2021 published twice as many academic papers on AI as their American counterparts. “This is a race that will quickly get as complex and as entangled as the ongoing silicon chip war,” Adani said.  

Since its launch on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT quickly garnered attention for its detailed responses and articulate answers across many domains of knowledge. Following the release of ChatGPT, OpenAI was valued at $29 billion. Users can ask questions and the bot will respond with relevant, natural-sounding answers and topics. Responses from ChatGPT sound quite human-like and it is designed to mimic real conversations.  

Earlier in January, Microsoft as planning to add optional ChatGPT functionality into its public search engine Bing, possibly around March 2023.  

However, it suffers from multiple limitations. OpenAI acknowledged that ChatGPT "sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers".  

In a December 2022 opinion piece, economist Paul Krugman wrote that ChatGPT would affect the demand for knowledge workers. Mike Pearl of Mashable tested ChatGPT with multiple questions and in one example, when he asked ChatGPT for “the largest country in Central America that isn’t Mexico”. ChatGPT responded with Guatemala, when the answer is instead Nicaragua.  

As per the trends, people are not running out of questions to ask ChatGPT. For example, a user asked the bot to write a leave of absence at work in “Shashi Tharoor style” and noticing the bot’s answer in extremely “dramatic” language, Congress MP Tharoor called it “hilarious”. (Click here to read the post on Twitter)

Other examples include, students of Bengaluru’s RV University received a stern notice from the dean of the School of Computer Science and Engineering. In the notice, the dean asked the student to avoid the use of AI agents such as ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot or Blackbox while submitting their original submission such as codes or essays.