Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Is ChatGPT finally getting it right? Our 60-year obsession with chatbots”.
This is not chat, GPT, it’s also not Gemini, and it’s not co-pilot, and it’s not any of the other Bots that everybody has been talking about for the last year. What it is is a replica of the first conversational bot to ever exist and it’s the beginning of the story that leads to all those other ones, and that story starts all the way back in 1966, wherever man goes, computers surround him changing the nature of Our Lives, I know I know 1966 is a very long time ago, but stay with me here we’re going somewhere. So there’s this guy Joseph weisen bomb who’s, a professor at MIT and in 1966 he publishes a paper in a journal called the communications for the association for computing Machinery in that paper. He describes this thing that he’s made a chatbot named Eliza, which – and I’m quoting here, makes certain kinds of natural language conversation between man and computer possible.
Eliza was set up to have the personality of a therapist, but it was really basic technology underneath, basically, you typed a sentence and it looked for keywords in those sentences and then applied those keywords to one of a bunch of pre-programmed responses. It had ready. Sometimes, if it didn’t know what to say or didn’t know what you were saying, it would just repeat your words back to you. Here’S a bit of the back and forth wisen bomb included in that original paper. Men are all alike in what way they’re always bugging us about something or other.
Can you think of a specific example? Well, my boyfriend made me come here. Your boyfriend made you come here. It goes on like that for a while, and it’s super basic, but you know what’s Wild it totally worked a year later, weisen bomb wrote another article in the same journal in which he said it had been hard to convince some people who tested Eliza that there Wasn’T a human on the other end that includes his own secretary in the paper. Weisen bomb wrote that her reaction was proof of Eliza’s illusion of understanding, and he even recited the anecdote to camera after two or three interchanges with the with the machine she turned to me and she said: would you mind leaving the room plays? This is the thing about chat, Bots, there’s just something about talking to a computer and the computer.
Talking back. That feels like magic. We give these bots human attributes even when they don’t have any.
We talk to them differently. We appreciate them more. We work with them more collaboratively. We just want to use them more and for decades, people have believed that, once the underlying Tech gets good enough, it’ll go from cool demo and fun thing to talk with to changing everything about how we interact with technology. What we really want to do is just talk to our device, and so for decades they really tried to get there, and eventually it got to be kind of good, we’ll get into how we got there right after this break.
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There was Dr SPO, which also tried to act like a psychologist. There was Alice, who was just a chill friendly bot that just kind of wanted to be your friend. The motivation behind these Bots was to be immersive for lack of a better word. To give you a sense of talking to a therapist that felt, if not real, then real enough to actually be useful therapy. You can read about all that stuff, but this was designed to be much closer to experiencing it around the same time. There was also another branch of research being done in the chatbot world.
Back in the’70s at the famous Xerox Park research lab there was a group working on this thing called Gus the genial understander system, which was meant to be a way to get stuff done on your computer. Just by talking in a natural language to a chat bot. The team’s example was a travel agent. What, if you could buy plane tickets on a computer the same way you would over the phone with a human. This is a much clearer, simpler use case for this kind of technology and to a lot of people even then felt like something you could make money from too. There were lots of project like this over the years, but I bet that at least for anyone over about 30.
The first time you really used a chatbot was when you used smarter child. Smarter child was a chatbot made for AOL, Instant Messenger, which is an extremely 2004 sentence to say, but it was a huge deal. It was made by a company called active buddy, and it was a mix of all of the things we’d seen before it had access to lots of information about news and stocks and such it could do math and help you with your homework. But most of all, it was also just really fun to talk to.
We were in the buddy list. Uh we were to people exactly what their friends were in the buddy list. That’S Peter Levon, one of the founders of active buddy. He had a team of writers working on smarter child who were coming up with the Bots responses. Smarter child had a great personality it if somebody cursed that it had had a response, so we understood what people were saying, and you know if it was an 11-year-old boy.
He had his own particular approach to communication. We were surprised at how popular it got and how crazy the conversations became in the mid 2000s active buddy licensed this Tech out to lots of places. It eventually figured out that there was no money to be made from smarter child itself, But ultimately, a lot of early Bots from like your cable company and your wireless carrier were powered by this same Tech.
Smarter child was our demonstration of our skill set and Technology and that’s what we showed commercial clients. Ultimately, the goal was believe it or not to make money eventually, Microsoft bought it with even more corporate plans than that and smarter child was gone now. You basically can’t find it anywhere on the internet. We found this site, which is something of an homage to smarter child, and that was the closest thing we could get our hands on after smarter child taught a bunch of aim. Kids: how to talk to chatbots. The next big phase was was what I guess. You’D call The Voice generation, it’s a feature all about our voice, okay, Google.
What do I have to do today? Alexa, open Cortana? This is when everyone got really excited about the idea that not only were chatbots the future, but we’d talk to them. Instead of typing to them, and if you apply the logic going all the way back to 1966, that makes perfect sense right. The goal is to make interacting with technology feel like interacting with humans, which just makes everything better, but I mean you’ve used, used, Siri and Alexa right, they’re great for a few things, and mostly terrible for everything else.
And honestly, God help you. If you try to book a flight through Google Assistant, all these companies and developers were convinced for years that they were hitting on the right interface, but even as the technology got better, it became increasingly obvious just how far it still had to go. Sorry, I don’t understand and then in 2017 another academic paper came out. Sorry talking about so many academic papers here, but it is important. This one was called attention is all you need and it was written by a bunch of Google researchers.
They laid out this idea of Transformers which are not robots in Disguise, but instead a way of teaching computers to understand and process information that is just vastly more effective and efficient than anything we’d had before. This is going to be a way oversimplified explanation, but basically what Transformers do is allow a computer to read and understand much more at a time instead of seeing one word and then predicting the next word, which is how it used to work Transformers. Let the computer see the whole sentence, the whole paragraph even the whole book at the same time, that gives it vastly more data to work with and makes its predictions as a result, much more accurate in the history of AI and chat Bots, and maybe everything there’s The world before Transformers and the world after and a few years later, we started to see that become real, particularly in late 2022. When chat, GPT came out and seemingly changed everything chat, GP, chat, GPT, it’s called chat GPT, which is just about the clunkiest name. Ever. Do you remember the first time you Ed chat, GPT, how it felt like when you typed a question, the bot was actually thinking and processing and it came back with an answer that wasn’t just a formul keyword response but actually felt like someone was answering.
Your question. Remember how cool that felt and then how everyone immediately was like. Oh man, the movie, Her is coming true, Scarlett Johansson’s totally going to be my girlfriend in my ear in like 2 years.
That was in a lot of ways the same experience. People were having with Eliza almost 60 years ago. Well, they didn’t talk about Scarlett Johansson back then, but you know what I mean the tech in chat.
Gpt is I mean wildly better than what was under Eliza, let’s just rerun, some of that first conversation from 1966 with Chad, GPT and see where we get men are all alike. It is important to recognize that making sweeping generalizations about any group of people, including men, can be inaccurate and unfair individuals. Okay, that’s a bad example or actually maybe that’s a good example chat.
Gpt probably handled that well, not as a therapist but as a chatbot and honestly. That is a deep, thoughtful answer to what I said. Chat GPT is mostly designed to be a get things done, chatbot, not a companion. It can help you write code and write, email and brainstorm ideas, find information all that kind of stuff, and even when chat, GPT or any other AI bot gets stuff wrong or makes mistakes which, by the way, they do all the time people forgive them. After all this time and as sophisticated as we are about technology, we still treat these Bots like we would people, I mean if you put numbers into a calculator and it gave you the wrong answer. That’S a bad calculator right. You return it, but because chat, GPT talks and appears to think like a person, we’re willing to go back and forth we’re willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the novelty of that will wear off eventually, but for many people it sure hasn’t. Yet. Meanwhile, all the way on the other end of the bot Spectrum, the Bots that are purely meant for conversation, are getting better all the time too, there are companies like replica and character, AI that are deliberately building AI companions, someone to talk to someone who will listen.
A best friend in the cloud, even meta is big on this idea. Now more and more people are signing up for that too. People want and respond to this kind of relationship and, if you add in augmented reality, those Bots are even able to have virtual bodies, and these robot companions are becoming more lifelike all the time. Is this what we want from technology technology that tricks us into thinking? We’Re talking to a human, even when we’re not do we even need to know the difference between human and Bot anymore. Is there even a distinction? I don’t know, but the whole history of chatbots has been based on this one theory that we should be able to talk to computers like we talk to each other and that that might make technology more accessible, more useful and just more fun to use.
There are a lot of smart people who have believed that for a really long time and a lot of smart people who think that whole theory is dead wrong, but the thing is, we’ve never had a chance to prove it either way because it hasn’t worked. Well enough and to be clear, even now, we’re not at some magic magical AI moment where the tech is perfect and will change everything forever, but the chatbot has been the future of computers for just about. As long as there have been computers now they’re, just here, they’re pretty good, and now we get to see once and for all whether Joseph weisen bomb really had it right all those years ago, uh, what’s a good last minute gift to get my wife a star Map a terrarium or indoor garden kit sure, oh virtual reality headset.
I don’t think she’s going to like a virtual reality. Headset .