It’s been a while since I’ve written anything! ChatGPT gave me the urge to write. After experiencing various AI products for so long, and writing so many small programs to let AI penetrate into every aspect of my life and work, is it time to write something to summarize and share it?
The above images were generated by Midjourney
ChatGPT also gave me the urge to stop writing. Let it help me write all the text in the future, okay?
Yes, it can help me write a lot of things, but what I want to say most in my heart, if I don't tell it, how will it know? At least, I still have to tell it my thoughts. Otherwise, if it writes wildly and randomly, what does it have to do with me?
Wu Shichun said in a recent letter to entrepreneurs:
ChatGPT allows more people in the world to have the ability to see through the essence, Essentially, it is a kind of cognitive equality.
There is nothing wrong with this statement, but in fact, is it really equal rights? On the one hand, many domestic friends don’t even have an OpenAI account and have never touched it, let alone changing their work and life through ChatGPT; there are also some friends who have used ChatGPT against all odds, but in fact it is just A blind man touches an elephant and touches an elephant's hoof, but he is far from feeling the powerful power of GPT4.
Some people are anxious and some are excited. This is a normal turning point in every era. And I have always been the optimist. I have never been anxious, but it is common to be overly excited. Artificial intelligence is indeed a nuclear weapon that enters the homes of ordinary people, giving everyone the opportunity to recognize equal rights. However, whether you can seize this opportunity depends on how each person responds.
Today’s attitudes and actions in the face of AI, Determines where we will be in society tomorrow.
The Chinese were the first to invent gunpowder, but foreigners used guns and cannons to open the blocked door of our land of China. How could the soldiers of the Qing Dynasty in the cold weapon era resist the foreign guns and artillery armed with hot weapons?
The steam engine brought about the first industrial revolution; the use of petroleum energy and electric energy brought about the second industrial revolution; the popularization of computers and the Internet brought about the third industry Revolution, every revolution pushes the development of human science and technology to new heights. Human commodities and materials also undergo a massive leap forward, and wealth will also be redistributed. Most of the giants that are closely related to our work and life were founded at the beginning of each industrial revolution. Some giants have survived three industrial revolutions and are still in business, while more giants have been overturned and replaced by emerging companies in the new industrial revolution. The market cycle never stops.
In my humble opinion, we are at the dawn of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Although it is only dawn, we have clearly felt that the information giant that has achieved the third industrial revolution - Google, is being suppressed by the emerging challenger - OpenAI. In the history of Internet development in the past 20 years, Google has been a god-like existence. I never thought that this small team that left Google would eventually bring such tremendous pressure to Google that it was the only time since its establishment that Google A red alert sounded, and the two retired founders were called back to discuss strategies to fend off the enemy. It is a pity that Google hastily launched Bart, a competing ChatGPT product, and the experience is unsatisfactory. Why is it that Google, which has never neglected its investment in the field of artificial intelligence and has AlphaGo that beats human Go masters, cannot make a product comparable to ChatGPT? Woolen cloth?
I am not a technical expert, and I don’t want to discuss the technical differences behind large language models and the debate over the route of artificial intelligence. I just understand the old saying from a larger perspective:
In this world, the only certainty is uncertainty.
Since the beginning of this year, ChatGPT has brought me so much:
Surprise, surprise, surprise!
It's amazing, how come it happened suddenly. Artificial intelligence, which has been called artificial intelligence for so many years, has been hiding behind some products and technologies in various subdivisions to do things like image recognition and sound synthesis. Over time, we seem to think that is the so-called artificial intelligence, and even more so. It's more artificial than intelligent.
And when we generally believe that general artificial intelligence (AGI) is still early in our real life, when we already stubbornly believe that the so-called artificial intelligence developed by major manufacturers is actually When artificial intelligence is retarded. ChatGPT has arrived so earth-shatteringly. I have been in Silicon Valley during this period, so I have no sympathy for the domestic situation; but in Silicon Valley, whether online or offline, the capital market and entrepreneurial circle that have been dying after three years of epidemic, inflation and interest rate hikes have been ignited again. This time it’s not a slow simmer, it’s a quick attack. Various LLM open source projects on Github are being updated and iterated at an unprecedented speed; various AIGC websites and projects have appeared in turn; countless KOLs who specialize in tracking and reporting AI technology and news have popped up on Youtube overnight. I was nervously looking into the camera and counting out a certain AI project that had just been released an hour ago, for fear that other big Vs would steal the first-mover advantage.
In addition to sleeping, I basically watch Youtube. Basically, I follow every KOL video in the AI field. I will get started with all the latest AI products as soon as possible. Experience, after a few months, I have become a junior Prompt Engineer (the latest profession in Silicon Valley, prompt word engineer).
Destiny is so magical. During the lockdown in Shanghai in March last year, I taught myself Python. Learning coding is an absolute advantage for understanding and experiencing the power of these AIs; various If you want to run such a large LLM language model on a local computer, you need to clone the code from Github and do some basic configuration processing before it can be run. It is either Python or Node.js. In short, you don’t know how to click the code. You can only follow what others say and watch the video. Only with certain hands-on ability can you make your own judgment. Are those big V’s exaggerating, or is this product really disruptive? You can only know it by running it yourself.
After several months of my use experience, there are not many AI products that can be maturely commercialized. Most of them are still early Alpha versions, and the concept is greater than the practicality. But these mature products are enough to change our lives and work.
Text field
The king of the text field is the ChatGPT intelligent chat assistant. It is actually a series of models launched by the parent company behind it, OpenAI. Most of them focus on the processing of text and code. This is what is called The power of the large language model lies in the input and output of Text text, and Code is also a special kind of text. Newbies who don't know how to program can only experience the power of GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 through ChatGPT. If you know how to program, you can call OpenAI's API interface to experience the power of large language models in all aspects. The so-called multi-modality, which has not yet been officially opened to the market, can even support the input and output of images, making your communication with artificial intelligence smoother.
One of the scenarios that best demonstrates the power of AI is that you draw a picture of the website you want on a scratch paper and send it to ChatGPT, and then he directly writes the website code for you. Good to send to you. (In fact, there are also some startups specializing in this segment, this one is called Text to Website); if you want to experience such a powerful ChatGPT, you must not only learn to surf the Internet scientifically, but also break through the barriers that OpenAI has set for users in a few countries. There are no two With a brush, we can only look forward to it in China.
Don't underestimate ChatGPT. Although it is just a text chat robot, text is the first core of communication in human society. The novels we read are text, fairy tales Stories are text, the core of movies, television and animation are also text-based scripts, the essence of code is text, the bottom layer of music is also music scores and lyrics in the form of text, emails are text, Excel tables are text, and most of the Office series products are in Processing text, even pictures can be described through text, so before I went to Midjourney to generate pictures, I first asked ChatGPT to help me generate rich picture descriptions based on the boring keywords I entered.
Nowadays, whether it is novels or audio books sold on Amazon; or Youtube, Douyin, and Tik tok video websites, they are all filled with a large amount of AI-generated content, both good and bad. , but quantity wins! White-collar workers who are keeping pace with the times have already begun to use AI to help process emails, write meeting minutes, generate product documents, summarize PPT, and write marketing releases; many Hollywood filmmakers have also begun to use ChatGPT to help write screenplays for movies and TV series.
So, the most killer application of large language model artificial intelligence is ChatGPT, which currently only processes text content!
Picture area
The king in the image field is Midjourney. The so-called Text to image, the quality and speed of image output can fully reach the commercial level without any problems. I see that many anchors on Douyin in China are spreading Midjourney's Prompt tutorials day and night, and sharing the exquisite digital artworks they create. I don't need to talk nonsense here. Just search for Midjourney on Douyin and you will understand everything at a glance. . The only flaw is that the API interface currently open by Midjourney corresponds to the old version of the model, and the amount of drawings produced is unsightly; if you want to experience Midjourney's latest models v4 and v5, you must register and log in to Discord, interact with Midjourney's robot bot, and send Prompt the picture you want and let the bot draw it for you. This threshold has eliminated many people who want to get on the bus. But this threshold is still lower than ChatGPT. After all, Midjourney officials do not deliberately block users from China.
If you really can’t play Midjourney, you can also try Stable Diffusion. This open source software has received huge development in the global open source community and can run on your local computer, provided that Your GPU must be powerful enough, otherwise it will take a long time to generate a picture, and most people don't have the patience. The time it takes Midjourney's Discord bot to post 4 pictures to paying users is about 30 seconds to 1 minute, for reference. As far as I know, many sellers on Taobao no longer buy model photos and instead use Midjourney to generate them directly; there are also some small game companies that have extensively used AI-generated virtual characters, which are more than a hundred times more efficient than human artists. The cost of art is gradually approaching 0.
Sound field
The king in the field of sound is Elevenlabs. Their AI synthesized sounds are very close to real human recordings. Their main focus is to clone your own voice so that you can broadcast from the future. Liberated from your career, Text to Speech has been fully realized. The efficiency of podcast creation has increased hundreds of times. The monthly fee of US$22 per month can help you produce speech corresponding to 100,000 words. It is actually very cost-effective. , it saves you a lot of recording time. If you don’t need your own voice, then I recommend using the 500,000 words/month free quota provided by Microsoft Azure. It is really good and is enough for ordinary content producers, but this quota cannot be used with your own cloned voice. Microsoft also provides customized voices, but training your own voice costs $5,000 (I think let’s forget it).
Using Elevenlabs' sound cloning API and the creative capabilities of ChatGPT, I created 35 episodes of children's audio stories similar to Andersen's fairy tales in just one afternoon and published them on Youtube Podcast. The challenge now is promotion, not creation, because creation has been fully automated by AI!
Programming field
The king in the field of programming is Microsoft's so-called Text to Code. After paying, you can install and activate it directly in Microsoft's Visual Studio Code. Next, when you are programming, you only need to write code comments, and the system will automatically write the code for you (in 80% of actual tests, the generated code is what you want), and the programming efficiency will be increased by at least 10 times. . Why do you say at least 10 times? Because not only do you no longer need to type the code line by line, but more importantly, in many cases, especially for a Python beginner like me, I cannot type a lot of code myself. I had to look up documents and tutorials everywhere to write good code, but now the system directly generates it for me, which is great news for junior programmers.
The above four areas are AI tools that I use every day in my daily life. I would be disabled without AI. I remember one day, OpenAI was down for a while. I was writing code at that time, and then I suddenly realized that I didn’t want to do anything anymore. AI was on strike for a long time, and I was on strike for a long time. We used to remember that when we were children, we could remember the phone numbers of all our good friends, but now, how many phone numbers can you remember? I also remember that when I was studying for my driver's license, I also took the manual transmission test, but after driving an automatic transmission car for more than ten years, I dare not touch a manual transmission car now. Do you dare? I think, if autonomous driving develops in another 10 years, how many humans will be able to drive themselves?
Human beings are degenerating step by step in this way. This is the inevitable result of technological progress. The essence of human evolution is degeneration!
There are also some AI products that are ready for commercial use. Although they are not perfect for C-end users, they have also been used by professionals to improve production efficiency. For example, Text to music, text to 3D, text to website.
There are still many AI products in the concept stage or early stage, such as Text to app, text to video, text to game. But the current iteration speed is one new one every week The version is evolving too fast, so it is expected to be commercially available soon!
The most worthy addition here is the recently popular AutoGPT, which is the so-called ‘autonomous AI’. The AI is managed by AI. The user only needs to enter the ultimate goal, and then the AI will have overall control over the decomposition tasks, and then assign them to other AIs with different divisions of labor, as well as various already written programs and various third-party APIs for collaborative execution. Currently, ChatGPT is mainly used behind it, but AI is also constantly being added to improve various functions and APIs, as well as other open source LLM language models. This AutoGPT is rumored to be amazing. In fact, it is still in the early stages. Currently, it can only do some relatively simple tasks, such as analyzing an industry, writing a simple web page, or ordering a pizza for you. But this is not important. What is important is the overall idea and logic of AutoGPT:
Let AI be your task manager,Not just one part of the task.
Originally, humans were project managers and task masters. Now, no matter what purpose you want to achieve with AI, you have to plan the logic of the entire task yourself and what to do in the first step. , what to do in the second step, what to do in the third step, and the output of each step is input to the next step by you. Human beings can still find their own value and reason for existence in this process.
Once AutoGPT evolves to help humans decompose and successfully perform large and complex tasks, for example, if you type: "Help me build an e-commerce website"; or if you say: "Help me develop An Angry Birds game"; or even you say: "Recommend a stock for me that may have an annualized return of more than 60%." At that time, the only meaning of human existence was: "Propose a goal!
It seems that everyone has the ability to set goals. And humans are greedy. We may be so lazy that we skip all intermediate goals and only propose the ultimate goal that most people have:
Help me make a billion dollars!
At that time, will AI that has surpassed our definition of so-called general artificial intelligence (AGI) think as follows:
Such greedy and useless humans,Can I replace it?
Of course, this will not be achieved in the near future, and the evolution of AutoGPT will take time. However, the sad thing is that many people have begun to worry about AI replacing humans and wiping out humans even before they have used ChatGPT.
In fact, I think technological progress cannot be stopped. If human beings are destined to develop silicon-based intelligence, then they can accept their fate calmly. There is no point in being anxious. It is better to embrace AI as a 'nuclear weapon' that everyone can quickly master. Arm yourself with AI first. Whether it is using existing AI technology to make money or improving existing business efficiency, it is worse than unfounded worries. Be good. AI evolves very quickly, and those who seize the opportunity to arm themselves with AI evolve even faster. Before AI can rule humans or eliminate them, we will first be 'enslaved' and 'exploited' by these human militants.
The essence of competition is to crush by advantage!
When your kind is armed and ready toDimensionality reduction you , what do you do to deal with it? Can you still block the attacks of foreign guns and cannons by continuing to hold the sword? The answeris self-evident!
The top priority is not meaningless anxiety, but crazy experience and experimentation, and reflection during the experiment, which things will soon be directly replaced by AI? For example, artists and junior coders who make a living by helping others draw pictures; what things will be greatly eliminated by people who have mastered AI? For example, they are just office white-collar workers whose main business is writing reports and forwarding emails as a link between the past and the future; which industries will disappear or the scale of the industry will shrink significantly? For example, when everyone masters ChatGPT, will everyone still need to buy books? ChatGPT can not only help you summarize all human written works that have appeared on the Internet, but also help you quickly generate new literary works in any style you want, No Additional fee required!
If we happen to be in an industry that is about to be directly eliminated by AI, then we:
Either master AI quickly and eliminate others;Either change careers early and prepare early!
We have witnessed the previous three industrial revolutions, experienced the speed of wealth creation accelerated by financial innovations such as joint-stock system + securities trading, and have just experienced the block with its own financial attributes. The unique explosive growth of the chain industry, wave after wave of era changes and technological leaps, have created generations of heroes and social elites. Some people are always envious of others who have seized the opportunities of the times and achieved great things; other people are complaining every minute that they were not born at the right time. But when a real opportunity is placed in front of you, what attitude and actions should you take to embrace it?
The dawn of the fourth industrial revolution has arrived.Who will be accomplished this time?What things will be subverted?We'll see!
But this time, it’s different:
Perhaps this is really the last opportunity for mankind to redistribute wealth;Perhaps, during the next industrial revolution, there will be no humans left in the solar system!