Impressions about AI

19 Aug 2024 - João Porto

Impressions after ~1.5 Years of ChatGPT’s release.

Impressions

In the beginning, generative AI truly surprised me because I was focused on development and had not studied AI for a while.

But today, I see the limitations of this tool. Indeed it is a data storage, data organizer, data retriever etc. Very sophisticated, very useful, but still limited. The main limitation is the creation of genuinely original ideas—ideas that are not present in the data it was trained on, because they have not yet been thought of. The thinking process is missing.

Today, I see AI more as a mechanism analogous to a Database Management System (DBMS) than as a thinking entity. And why a DBMS? Because it stores a large set of data and offers us the possibility of accessing parts of that set according to our needs, for which we express what we want. The difference between it and a conventional DBMS like MySQL or PostgreSQL is that we do not use a formal language like SQL, but natural language.

This is no small thing, as the number of people who can use the tool expands, given that more people can express themselves in natural language than in SQL.

Of course, this is a simplistic analysis and I would need to define more precisely what it means to think in order to say that AI does not think, but I will limit myself to staying within the realm of impression based on what I’ve described. And, according to this impression, AI still has a long way to go.

I eagerly await the moment when it can, in fact, be a thinking entity.

Note: text translated from Portuguese to English via AI.

References

Quora contributors. “Where Do Natural Languages (like English) Fit on the Chomsky Hierarchy?” Quora, 2019, www.quora.com/Where-do-natural-languages-like-English-fit-on-the-Chomsky-hierarchy. Accessed 18 Aug. 2024.

Wikipedia contributors. “Chomsky Hierarchy.” Wikipedia, 9 Dec. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy. Accessed 18 Aug. 2024.

Wikipedia contributors. “Formal Language.” Wikipedia, 8 Oct. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_language. Accessed 18 Aug. 2024.