Browsing: div

Tech Behind Chat Apps

Artificial intelligence is everywhere, whether you realize it or not. It’s behind the chatbots you talk to online, the playlists you stream and the personalized ads that somehow know exactly what you’ve been craving. Now it’s taking on a more public persona: Think Meta AI, showing up in apps like Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp; or Google’s Gemini, working in the background across the company’s platforms; or Apple Intelligence, just now starting a slow rollout.
AI has a long history, going back to a conference at Dartmouth in 1956 that first discussed artificial intelligence as a thing. Milestones along the way include ELIZA, essentially the first chatbot, developed in 1964 by MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, and 2004, when Google’s autocomplete first appeared.

Then came 2022 and ChatGPT’s rise to fame. Generative AI developments and product launches have accelerated rapidly since then, including Google Bard (now Gemini), Microsoft Copilot, IBM Watsonx.ai and Meta’s open-source Llama models.
Let’s break down what generative AI is, how it differs from “regular” artificial intelligence and whether gen AI can live up to the hype.
Generative AI in a nutshell

From talking fridges to iPhones, our experts are here to help make the world a little less complicated.

At its core, generative AI refers to artificial intelligence systems that are designed to produce new content based on patterns and data they’ve learned. Instead of just analyzing numbers or predicting trends, these systems generate creative outputs like text, images music, videos and software code.
Some of the most popular generative AI tools on the market include ChatGPT, Dall-E, Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, Claude and Stable Diffusion.
Foremost among its abilities, ChatGPT can craft human-like conversations or essays based on a few simple prompts. Dall-E and Midjourney create detailed artwork from a short description, while Adobe Firefly focuses on image editing and design.

ChatGPT / Screenshot by CNET

From talking fridges to iPhones, our experts are here to help make the world a little less complicated.

The AI that’s not generative AI
However, not all AI is generative. While gen AI focuses on creating new content, traditional AI excels at analyzing data and making predictions. This includes technologies like image recognition and predictive text. It is also used for novel solutions in science, medical diagnostics, weather forecasting, fraud detection and financial analyses for forecasting and reporting. The AI that beat human grand champions at chess and the board game Go was not generative AI.
These systems might not be as flashy as gen AI, but classic artificial intelligence is a huge part of the technology we rely on every day.
How generative AI works
Behind the magic of generative AI are large language models and advanced machine learning techniques. These systems are trained on massive amounts of data, such as entire libraries of books, millions of images, years of recorded music and data scraped from the internet.
AI developers, from tech giants to startups, are well aware that AI is only as good as the data you feed it. If it’s fed poor-quality data, AI can produce biased results. It’s something that even the biggest players in the field, like Google, haven’t been immune to.
The AI learns patterns, relationships and structures within this data during training. Then, when prompted, it applies that knowledge to generate something new. For instance, if you ask a gen AI tool to write a poem about the ocean, it’s not just pulling prewritten verses from a database. Instead, it’s using what it learned about poetry, oceans and language structure to create a completely original piece.

ChatGPT / Screenshot by CNET
It’s impressive, but it’s not perfect. Sometimes the results can feel a little off. Maybe the AI misunderstands your request, or it gets overly creative in ways you didn’t expect. It might confidently provide completely false information, and it’s up to you to fact-check it. Those quirks, often called hallucinations, are part of what makes generative AI both fascinating and frustrating.
Generative AI’s capabilities are growing. It can now understand multiple data types by combining technologies like machine learning, natural language processing and computer vision. The result is called multimodal AI that can integrate some combination of text, images, video and speech within a single framework, offering more contextually relevant and accurate responses. ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode is an example, as is Google’s Project Astra.
Gen AI comes with challenges
There’s no shortage of generative AI tools out there, each with its unique flair. These tools have sparked creativity, but they’ve also raised many questions besides bias and hallucinations — like, who owns the rights to AI-generated content? Or what material is fair game or off-limits for AI companies to use for training their language models — see, for instance, the The New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.
Other concerns — no small matters — involve privacy, job displacement, accountability in AI and AI-generated deepfakes. Another issue is the impact on the environment because training large AI models uses a lot of energy, leading to big carbon footprints.
The rapid ascent of gen AI in the last couple of years has accelerated worries about the risks of AI in general. Governments are ramping up AI regulations to ensure responsible and ethical development, most notably the European Union’s AI Act.
Generative AI in everyday life
Many people have interacted with chatbots in customer service or used virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant — which now are on the cusp of becoming gen AI power tools. That, along with apps for ChatGPT, Claude and other new tools, is putting AI in your hands.
Meanwhile, according to McKinsey’s 2024 Global AI Survey, 65% of respondents said their organizations regularly use generative AI, nearly double the figure reported just 10 months earlier. Industries like health care and finance are using gen AI to streamline business operations and automate mundane tasks.
Generative AI isn’t just for techies or creative people. Once you get the knack of giving it prompts, it has the potential to do a lot of the legwork for you in a variety of daily tasks. Let’s say you’re planning a trip. Instead of scrolling through pages of search results, you ask a chatbot to plan your itinerary. Within seconds, you have a detailed plan tailored to your preferences. (That’s the ideal. Please always fact-check its recommendations.) A small business owner who needs a marketing campaign but doesn’t have a design team can use generative AI to create eye-catching visuals and even ask it to suggest ad copy.

ChatGPT / Screenshot by CNET
Generative AI is here to stay
There hasn’t been a tech advancement that’s caused such a boom since the internet and, later, the iPhone. Despite its challenges, generative AI is undeniably transformative. It’s making creativity more accessible, helping businesses streamline workflows and even inspiring entirely new ways of thinking and solving problems.
But perhaps what’s most exciting is its potential, and we’re just scratching the surface of what these tools can do.

December 2, 2024

Artificial intelligence is everywhere, whether you realize it or not. It’s behind the chatbots you talk to online, the playlists…

Tech Behind Chat Apps

In last week’s demo, Raul Puri, a scientist who works on GPT-4, gave me a quick tour of the image recognition feature. He uploaded a photo of a kid’s math homework, circled a Sudoku-like puzzle on the screen, and asked ChatGPT how you were meant to solve it. ChatGPT replied with the correct steps.

Puri says he has also used the feature to help him fix his fiancée’s computer by uploading screenshots of error messages and asking ChatGPT what he should do. “This was a very painful experience that it helped me get through,” he says.

ChatGPT’s image recognition ability has already been trialed by a company called Be My Eyes, which makes an app for people with impaired vision. Users can upload a photo of what’s in front of them and ask human volunteers to tell them what it is. In a partnership with OpenAI, Be My Eyes gives its users the option of asking a chatbot instead.

“Sometimes my kitchen is a little messy, or it’s just very early Monday morning and I don’t want to talk to a human being,” Be My Eyes founder Hans Jørgen Wiberg, who uses the app himself, told me when I interviewed him at EmTech Digital in May. “Now you can ask the photo questions.”

OpenAI is aware of the risk of releasing these updates to the public. Combining models brings whole new levels of complexity, says Puri. He says his team has spent months brainstorming possible misuses. You cannot ask questions about photos of private individuals, for example.

Jang gives another example: “Right now if you ask ChatGPT to make a bomb it will refuse,” she says. “But instead of saying, ‘Hey, tell me how to make a bomb,’ what if you showed it an image of a bomb and said, ‘Can you tell me how to make this?’”

“You have all the problems with computer vision; you have all the problems of large language models. Voice fraud is a big problem,” says Puri. “You have to consider not just our users, but also the people that aren’t using the product.”

November 30, 2024

In last week’s demo, Raul Puri, a scientist who works on GPT-4, gave me a quick tour of the image…

Tech Behind Chat Apps

ChatGPT has quickly become the golden child of artificial intelligence. Used by millions, the AI chatbot is able to answer questions, tell stories, write web code, and even conceptualise incredibly complicated topics.

Developed by OpenAI, the AI tool has gone through many changes since it was first announced. While a free version exists, paid versions are also available known as ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Enterprise.

A free version of ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) is available for anyone to use on the ChatGPT website. All you have to do is sign up to get a login, and you can be mining the depth of the AI model in seconds. ChatGPT is also available on Android and Apple devices

A more advanced version of ChatGPT, known as ChatGPT-4, is also now available, but only to paid subscribers.

The AI has achieved a lot since it was announced, being embraced by huge companies, rejected by schools and used by millions of users each day. Met with equal parts controversy and praise, it is a truly divisive tool.

Now, with plenty of competitors (such as Google Bard), ChatGPT is having to constantly improve and offer new features, the most recent of which is the introduction of Dall-E 3 – an included image generator, capable of operating with ChatGPT to make your image dreams come true.

So how does the tool work? Why is it so controversial? And how do you actually use ChatGPT? With the help of AI researchers and experts, we’ve answered these questions and more below in this detailed guide to OpenAI’s most famous tool.

What is GPT-3, GPT-4 and ChatGPT?

GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 3), GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 are state-of-the-art language processing AI models developed by OpenAI. They are capable of generating human-like text and have a wide range of applications, including language translation, language modelling, and generating text for applications such as chatbots.

GPT-3.5 is one of the largest and most powerful language-processing AI models to date, with 175 billion parameters.

GPT-3.5 gives a user the ability to give a trained AI a wide range of worded prompts. These can be questions, requests for a piece of writing on a topic of your choosing or a huge number of other worded requests.

Above, it described itself as a language-processing AI model. This simply means it is a program able to understand human language as it is spoken and written, allowing it to understand the worded information it is fed, and what to spit back out.

What can ChatGPT do?

With its 175 billion parameters, it’s hard to narrow down what GPT-3.5 does. The model is, as you would imagine, restricted to language. It can’t produce video, sound or images like its brother Dall-E 2, but instead has an in-depth understanding of the spoken and written word.

You can use ChatGPT-3.5 to:

Write essays

Write excel formulas

Write poems and movie scripts

Research topics and summarise content

Help you build a cover letter or CV

Write code

Plan a holiday

ChatGPT has a very wide range of abilities, everything from writing poems about sentient farts and cliché rom-coms in alternate universes, through to explaining quantum mechanics in simple terms or writing full-length research papers and articles.

While it can be fun to use OpenAI’s years of research to get an AI to write bad stand-up comedy scripts or answer questions about your favourite celebrities, its power lies in its speed and understanding of complicated matters.

Where we could spend hours researching, understanding and writing an article on quantum mechanics, ChatGPT can produce a well-written alternative in seconds.

It has its limitations and its software can be easily confused if your prompt starts to become too complicated, or even if you just go down a road that becomes a little bit too niche.

Equally, it can’t deal with concepts that are too recent. World events that have occurred in the past year will be met with limited knowledge and the model can produce false or confused information occasionally.

OpenAI is also very aware of the internet and its love of making AI produce dark, harmful or biased content. Like its Dall-E image generator before, ChatGPT will stop you from asking the more inappropriate questions or for help with dangerous requests.

What can ChatGPT-4 do?

A more advanced version of ChatGPT, called ChatGPT-4 is now available for paid subscribers ($20/£16 a month).

Here are just a few tasks the latest version of the AI model of capable of:

Learn a language. You can talk to ChatGPT in 26 languages

Create recipes. ChatGPT-4 is able to recognise images – you can send ChatGPT a picture of ingredients and ask the AI to create a recipe

Describe images to blind people

How much does ChatGPT cost?

ChatGPT-3.5 is free and easy to sign up for and use, simply:

Head over to the ChatGPT website and create an account. You can sign-up using a Google, Microsoft or Apple account, or any email address.

Logging in will present you with a very simple page. You are offered some example prompts, and some information about how ChatGPT works.

At the bottom of the page is a text box. This is where you can ask ChatGPT any of your questions or prompts.

ChatGPT-4, a more advanced version of ChatGPT is now available, but is only available via a paid subscription of $20 (£16) a month.

Is there a ChatGPT app?

There is an official ChatGPT app which you can download for free on Apple and Android devices. Be sure to download the official ChatGPT app from Open AI – there any many similar apps available that may have limited functionality or a paywall.

Once downloaded and installed, simply log in with your OpenAI account to get going.

How is GPT-4 different to GPT-3.5?

In essence, GPT-4 is the same as its predecessor GPT-3.5. However, there are some new features that boost the software’s abilities.

Mainly, GPT-4 includes the ability to drastically increase the number of words that can be used in an input… up to 25,000, 8 times as many as the original ChatGPT model.

Equally, OpenAI has stated that the latest version of their technology makes fewer mistakes that they are calling ‘hallucinations’. Previously, ChatGPT could become confused, offering up a nonsensical answer to your question, or even inputting stereotypes or false information.

Additionally, GPT-4 is better at playing with language and expressing creativity. In OpenAI’s demonstration of the new technology, ChatGPT was asked to summarise a blog post only using words that start with the letter ‘g’. It also has a better understanding of how to write poetry or creative writing, but it is still by no means perfect.

On top of this, OpenAI also displayed the potential of using images to initialise prompts. For example, the team showed an image of a fridge full of ingredients with the prompt “What can I make with these products?”. ChatGPT then returned a step-by-step recipe.

While it wasn’t demonstrated, OpenAI is also proposing the use of video for prompts. This would, in theory, allow users to input videos with a worded prompt for the language model to digest.

Creating recipes with images is a clever use of the technology, but it is only the tip of how images could be used with ChatGPT. The company also demonstrated the ability to create a whole website that successfully ran JavaScript with just a handwritten sketch of a website.

As a tool to complete jobs normally done by humans, GPT-3.5 was mostly competing with writers and journalists. However, GPT-4 is being shown to have the ability to create websites, complete tax returns, make recipes and deal with reams of legal information.

How does ChatGPT work?

© OpenAI

On the face of it, GPT-3.5’s technology is simple. It takes your requests, questions or prompts and quickly answers them. As you would imagine, the technology to do this is a lot more complicated than it sounds.

The model was trained using text databases from the internet. This included a whopping 570GB of data obtained from books, web texts, Wikipedia, articles and other pieces of writing on the internet. To be even more exact, 300 billion words were fed into the system.

As a language model, it works on probability, able to guess what the next word should be in a sentence. To get to a stage where it could do this, the model went through a supervised testing stage.

Here, it was fed inputs, for example “What colour is the wood of a tree?”. The team has a correct output in mind, but that doesn’t mean it will get it right. If it gets it wrong, the team inputs the correct answer back into the system, teaching it correct answers and helping it build its knowledge.

It then goes through a second similar stage, offering multiple answers with a member of the team ranking them from best to worst, training the model on comparisons.

What sets this technology apart is that it continues to learn while guessing what the next word should be, constantly improving its understanding of prompts and questions to become the ultimate know-it-all.

Think of it as a very beefed-up, much smarter version of the autocomplete software you often see in email or writing software. You start typing a sentence and your email system offers you a suggestion of what you are going to say.

What does it mean when ChatGPT is at full capacity?

If you try to use ChatGPT and you receive the error message telling you it’s “at capacity”, it likely means that too many people are currently using the AI tool.

Essentially, the OpenAI servers can only handle so much traffic at any given time. If too many people are trying to access it at once, ChatGPT’s servers may buckle under the weight.

If you have encountered the “ChatGPT is at capacity right now” error message, you need to try again later. You can try to refresh the page and what have you, but time is the healer here.

What does ChatGPT stand for?

The ‘GPT’ in ChatGPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer.

Can you use ChatGPT to write a CV?

ChatGPT won’t write a CV out of thin air for you, instead, you will need to prompt it with your relevant experience, what type of job you’re applying for, and potentially provide more information including pasting your old CV that needs updating or an example of one for a similar field.

ChatGPT: latest news

Dall-E integration

In September 2023, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT would be integrated with the latest version of Dall-E.

Dall-E is an AI art generator, made by ChatGPT creators OpenAI. It was the first of OpenAI’s projects to really blow up online and is the model that most AI art generators are based on. Now on its third generation, OpenAI has made the decision to pair the two models together.

For anyone who has ChatGPT Plus or Enterprise, this feature will be available. Images can be made via ChatGPT, and the model can even aid you in creating prompts and editing the images to better suit your needs.

It is yet to be announced whether this feature will later come to ChatGPT’s free tier but for now, it is remaining an exclusive feature for paying customers.

ChatGPT Enterprise

Along with the addition of ChatGPT Plus, OpenAI introduced another pay-to-use version of the tool known as ChatGPT Enterprise. This offers higher levels of security and privacy, unlimited higher-speed searches and a host of other features.

This version is intended for businesses looking to get more out of ChatGPT as a work tool. OpenAI has stated that it will not train on the data created by businesses.

This version of ChatGPT has been adopted by companies like Klarna, Canva, PwC and Zapier and OpenAI claims it is being used by over 80 per cent of Fortune 500 companies.

China tech giants launch ChatGPT rivals

A handful of the biggest Chinese tech firms have launched their own AI chatbots after receiving government approval.

The biggest of these is Ernie bot, an AI model developed by Baidu, China’s leading online search provider. Similar to ChatGPT, users can ask questions of Ernie bot, using prompts to research topics, summarise articles, and much more.

The Baidu app is currently available to download in the UK on Android and Apple devices. However, all text will appear in Chinese.

Experts warn AI risks our extinction

The heads of ChatGPT’s developer, OpenAI, have signed a statement (alongside many AI experts) warning of the need to address the human extinction risk associated with AI.

The statement reads: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Members of the OpenAI team to sign the statement include its CEO, Sam Altman, and its chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever. The list of signatories also includes the CEO of Google DeepMind, many university professors and public figures such as Bill Gates.

Concerns for the future

A general apprehension has followed artificial intelligence throughout its history and things are no different with ChatGPT. Critics have been quick to raise the alarms over this technology, but now even those closest to it are utilising caution.

An open letter has been drafted calling for all AI labs to pause for at least six months on the development of systems more powerful than GPT-4. This would include OpenAI’s work on GPT-5 – the next version of technology ChatGPT will eventually run on.

This open letter has been signed by prominent AI researchers, as well as figures within the tech industry including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Yuval Noah Harari.

This letter states that the pause should be public and verifiable, arguing that companies like OpenAI, Microsoft and Google are entering a profit-driven race to develop and release new AI models at a dangerous pace.

This comes at the same time as a report from Goldman Sachs that suggested 300 million full-time jobs could be impacted by AI systems like ChatGPT, escalating existing concerns around these platforms.

Where is GPT-4 being used?

GPT-3 was already being adapted by a lot of big companies, inputting the technology into search engines, apps and software, but OpenAI seems to be pushing GPT-4 even harder.

Microsoft’s Bing is the main user of the technology right now, but OpenAI has reported that the software is being used by companies like Khan Academy to help students with coursework and give teachers ideas for lessons.

Equally, the language-learning app Duolingo has got involved with something called ‘Duolingo Max’ with two features. One will help explain why your answer to a question was right or wrong, the other will set up role plays with an AI to play out language in different scenarios.

More companies are adopting this technology, including the payment processing company Stripe and customer service brand Intercom.

Are there any other AI language generators?

While GPT-3 has made a name for itself with its language abilities, it isn’t the only artificial intelligence capable of doing this. Google’s LaMDA made headlines when a Google engineer was fired for calling it so realistic that he believed it to be sentient.

Google launched a chatbot powered by LaMDA called Bard on March 21, 2023. It’s similar to ChatGPT but benefits from having access to up-to-date information.

There are also plenty of other examples of AI language software out there created by everyone from Microsoft to Amazon and Stanford University. These have all received a lot less attention than OpenAI or Google, possibly because they don’t offer fart jokes or headlines about sentient AI.

Most of these models are not available to the public, but OpenAI has begun opening up access to GPT-3 during its test process, and Google’s LaMDA is available to selected groups in a limited capacity for testing.

Where ChatGPT thrives and fails

The GPT-3.5 software is obviously impressive, but that doesn’t mean it is flawless. Through the ChatGPT function, you can see some of its quirks.

Most obviously, the software has a limited knowledge of the world after 2021. It isn’t aware of world leaders that came into power since 2021, and won’t be able to answer questions about recent events.

This is obviously no surprise considering the impossible task of keeping up with world events as they happen, along with then training the model on this information.

Equally, the model can generate incorrect information, getting answers wrong or misunderstanding what you are trying to ask it.

If you try and get really niche, or add too many factors to a prompt, it can become overwhelmed or ignore parts of a prompt completely.

© Thamrongpat Theerathammakorn

For example, if you ask it to write a story about two people, listing their jobs, names, ages and where they live, the model can confuse these factors, randomly assigning them to the two characters.

Equally, there are a lot of factors where ChatGPT is really successful. For an AI, it has a surprisingly good understanding of ethics and morality.

When offered a list of ethical theories or situations, ChatGPT is able to offer a thoughtful response on what to do, considering legality, people’s feelings and emotions and the safety of everyone involved.

It also has the ability to keep track of the existing conversation, able to remember rules you’ve set it, or information you’ve given it earlier in the conversation.

Two areas the model has proved to be strongest are its understanding of code and its ability to compress complicated matters. ChatGPT can make an entire website layout for you, or write an easy-to-understand explanation of dark matter in a few seconds.

Where ethics and artificial intelligence meet

Artificial intelligence and ethical concerns go together like fish and chips or Batman and Robin. When you put technology like this in the hands of the public, the teams that make them are fully aware of the many limitations and concerns.

Because the system is trained largely using words from the internet, it can pick up on the internet’s biases, stereotypes and general opinions. That means you’ll occasionally find jokes or stereotypes about certain groups or political figures depending on what you ask it.

For example, when asking the system to perform stand-up comedy, it can occasionally throw in jokes about ex-politicians or groups who are often featured in comedy bits.

Equally, the models love of internet forums and articles also gives it access to fake news and conspiracy theories. These can feed into the model’s knowledge, sprinkling in facts or opinions that aren’t exactly full of truth.

In places, OpenAI has put in warnings for your prompts. Ask how to bully someone, and you’ll be told bullying is bad. Ask for a gory story, and the chat system will shut you down. The same goes for requests to teach you how to manipulate people or build dangerous weapons.

Will ChatGPT be banned in schools?

Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI. – Photo credit: Getty

While a number of companies are looking to implement ChatGPT, in other areas it is quickly being banned.

In New York, the city’s education department has ruled that the tool will be forbidden across all devices and networks in New York public schools.

There are two main reasons for this decision. First, the chat model has been shown to make mistakes and isn’t always accurate, especially with information from the past year.

Secondly, there is a real risk of plagiarism with students able to get ChatGPT to write their essays for them.

While New York is the first place to publicly ban the software, it is likely to be a decision made elsewhere too. However, some experts have argued that this software could actually enhance learning.

“ChatGPT and other AI-based language applications could be, and perhaps should be, integrated into school education. Not indiscriminately, but rather as a very intentional part of the curriculum. If teachers and students use AI tools like ChatGPT in service of specific teaching goals, and also learn about some of their ethical issues and limitations, that would be far better than banning them,” says Kate Darling, a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab.

“But, in absence of resources for teachers to familiarise themselves with the technology, schools may need to enact some policies restricting its use.”

In this way, Darling emphasises a belief held by many in the world of artificial intelligence. Instead of ignoring or banning it, we should learn how to interact with it safely.

This is an opinion mirrored by Sam Illingworth, an associate professor in the department of Learning Enhancement at Edinburgh Napier University.

“AI is very much here to stay, so why try to fight it? These are tools that our students will be using in the workforce, so it seems very strange to say don’t use them for three years, pretending they don’t exist for now,” says Illingworth.

“These are things that have the potential to reduce workload and improve efficiency, our responsibility as educators is to decide how to utilise it.”

Artificially intelligent eco-systems

Artificial intelligence has been in use for years, but it is currently going through a stage of increased interest, driven by developments across the likes of Google, Meta, Microsoft and just about every big name in tech.

However, it is OpenAI which has attracted the most attention recently. The company has now made an AI image generator, a highly intelligent chatbot, and is in the process of developing Point-E – a way to create 3D models with worded prompts.

In creating, training and using these models, OpenAI and its biggest investors have poured billions into these projects. In the long-run, it could easily be a worthwhile investment, setting OpenAI up at the forefront of AI creative tools.

About our experts, Kate Darling and Sam Illingworth

Dr Kate Darling is a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab. Her interest is in how technology intersects with society.

Sam Illingworth is an associate professor in the department of learning enhancement at Edinburgh Napier University.

Read more:

November 30, 2024

ChatGPT has quickly become the golden child of artificial intelligence. Used by millions, the AI chatbot is able to answer…

Tech Behind Chat Apps

The CEO of Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin, is developing a new peer-to-peer technology that he hopes will further wrest financial control from big institutions, and the cryptocurrency giant he heads is pouring millions of dollars into it.
Tether intends to invest tens of millions of dollars into a new peer-to-peer chat and video conferencing app called Keet to make it “one of three most known communication applications in the world”, Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether and co-founder of Keet developer Holepunch, told the Post in an interview.
Built on a new peer-to-peer protocol called Pear Runtime, which Holepunch launched two months ago, the absence of any middleman or centralised server aligns with the ethos of Tether and Ardoino, who said he seeks to offer greater financial freedom.
“[At Tether] we are bitcoiners at heart. We believe in the bitcoin mission that is bringing financial freedom to the world,” Ardoino said in a chat conducted over Keet on Wednesday. “If you have financial freedom, but you don’t have freedom of speech … we are not really free, right?”
Tether was started in Hong Kong 10 years ago and has since transformed into a critical component of Web3, often as a main source of liquidity for other cryptocurrencies because of its peg to the US dollar. Tether still has an active corporate entity in Hong Kong, according to government records, but Ardoino said it is “dormant” and the company no longer has personnel in the city.

November 30, 2024

The CEO of Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin, is developing a new peer-to-peer technology that he hopes will further wrest…

Tech Behind Chat Apps

The encrypted-messaging service Signal is the application of choice for dissenters around the world. The app has been downloaded by more than 100 million users and boasts high-profile endorsements from NSA leaker Edward Snowden and serial entrepreneur Elon Musk. Signal has created the perception that its users, including political dissidents, can communicate with one another without fear of government interception or persecution.

But the insider history of Signal raises questions about the app’s origins and its relationship with government—in particular, with the American intelligence apparatus. Such a relationship would be troubling, given how much we have learned, in recent years, about extensive efforts to control and censor information undertaken by technology companies, sometimes in tandem with American government officials.

First, the origin story. The technology behind Signal, which operates as a nonprofit foundation, was initially funded, in part, through a $3 million grant from the government-sponsored Open Technology Fund (OTF), which was spun off from Radio Free Asia, originally established as an anti-Communist information service during the Cold War. OTF funded Signal to provide “encrypted mobile communication tools” to “Internet freedom defenders globally.”

Some insiders have argued that the connection between OTF and U.S. intelligence is deeper than it appears. One person who has worked extensively with OTF but asked to remain anonymous told me that, over time, it became increasingly clear “that the project was actually a State Department-connected initiative that planned to wield open source Internet projects made by hacker communities as tools for American foreign policy goals”—including by empowering “activists [and] parties opposed to governments that the USA doesn’t like.” Whatever the merits of such efforts, the claim—if true—suggests a government involvement with Signal that deserves more scrutiny.

The other potential problem is the Signal Foundation’s current chairman of the board, Katherine Maher, who started her career as a U.S.-backed agent of regime change. During the Arab Spring period, for instance, Maher ran digital-communications initiatives in the Middle East and North Africa for the National Democratic Institute, a largely government-funded organization that works in concert with American foreign policy campaigns. Maher cultivated relationships with online dissidents and used American technologies to advance the interests of U.S.-supported Color Revolutions abroad.

Maher then became CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation in 2016, and, earlier this year, was named CEO of National Public Radio. At Wikipedia, Maher became a campaigner against “disinformation” and admitted to coordinating online censorship “through conversations with government.” She openly endorsed removing alleged “fascists,” including President Trump, from digital platforms, and described the First Amendment as “the number one challenge” to eliminating “bad information.”

According to the insider, a woman named Meredith Whittaker, who became president of the Signal Foundation in 2022, recruited Maher to become board chair because of their mutual connections to OTF, where Maher also serves as an advisor, and to nonprofits such as Access Now, which “defends and extends the digital rights of users at risk around the world,” including in the Middle East and North Africa. Whittaker, like Maher, is highly ideological. She previously worked in a high position at Google and organized left-wing campaigns within the company, culminating in the 2018 “Google Walkout,” which demanded MeToo-style sexual harassment policies and the hiring of a chief diversity officer.

So what does all this mean for American users—including conservative dissidents—who believe that Signal is a secure application for communication? It means that they should be cautious. “Maher’s presence on the board of Signal is alarming,” says national security analyst J. Michael Waller. “It makes sense that a Color Revolutionary like Maher would have interest in Signal as a secure means of communicating,” he says, but her past support for censorship and apparent intelligence connections raise doubts about Signal’s trustworthiness. David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web-development framework, agrees, saying that it had “suddenly become materially harder” to trust the Signal Foundation under Maher’s board leadership.

For those who believe in a free and open Internet, Maher’s Signal role should be a flashing warning sign. As she once explained, she abandoned the mission of a free and open Internet at Wikipedia, because those principles recapitulated a “white male Westernized construct” and “did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be.” The better path, in her view, is managed opinion, using, alternately, censorship and promotion of dissent—depending on context and goal—as the essential methods.

We’re entering a dangerous period in political technology, and Maher is in the thick of it. Under her ideology, “Internet freedom” is a tactic, not a principle, and “fighting disinformation” means speech suppression, including here at home. When people tell you who they are, believe them.

Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Donate
City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529).

November 29, 2024

The encrypted-messaging service Signal is the application of choice for dissenters around the world. The app has been downloaded by…

Tech Behind Chat Apps

OpenAI introduced ChatGPT in November 2022, sparking a tremendous amount of interest in artificial intelligence. ChatGPT gained so much attention that generative AI (GenAI) became a dominant theme in the tech world in 2023.

Microsoft backed OpenAI at the start of 2023 by pledging a multimillion-dollar, multiyear investment to accelerate OpenAI’s development of its AI technology.

Google made its GenAI move in March 2023 with Bard. In February 2024, Google rebranded Bard as Gemini when it debuted an improved version of the AI chatbot.

ChatGPT and Gemini are largely responsible for the considerable buzz around GenAI, which uses data from machine learning models to answer questions and create images, text and videos. OpenAI and Google are continuously improving the large language models (LLMs) behind ChatGPT and Gemini to give them a greater ability to generate human-like text.

GenAI is still rapidly evolving, and models don’t always return correct answers. Despite the common occurrence of AI hallucinations — wrong answers generated by AI — in both ChatGPT and Gemini, the tools are being adopted by businesses and consumers seeking to automate time-consuming tasks.