The coming creative destruction from AI

Artificial intelligence’s impact could be bigger than that of China joining the WTO, but will pose challenges for policymakers

- Vikram Khanna

On my prompt, artificial intelligence (AI) - aka "machine learning" - created a film script on the life of Singapore's first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, which it then translated into Chinese. It generated an impressionistic image of Singapore's skyline, and then another one of a frog dancing on Changi Beach. It also provided the content for a PowerPoint presentation. In a recent demonstration, it turned a hand-drawn sketch of a webpage into an actual website by generating code that matched the sketch. It did each of the above in less than a minute.

The capabilities of AI - of which the popular ChatGPT is but one manifestation - are now mind-boggling. And they keep getting better. ChatGPT-4, which was released on March 14, is a dramatic upgrade on the earlier version, ChatGPT-3.5.

It scored in the top 10 per cent of the United States bar exam, whereas its predecessor scored in the bottom 10 per cent. It did even better on the Biology Olympiad, the top biology competition for high school students, rating in the top 1 per cent, compared with the bottom 31 per cent for ChatGPT-3.5. It has been found to be 40 per cent more likely to give factually correct responses.

Google has also launched Bard, a rival conversational AI chatbot to ChatGPT. Meta, Amazon and Baidu are among other big-tech companies that have similar chatbots.

Like humans, chatbots can make mistakes and have biases, but they are improving. Besides the general variety, there are several specialised chatbots catering to a variety of industries.

The Al wars will get more intense - which would be good for users.