Tech Roundtable Meeting 3/15/23

Screen shot of OpenAI application of Future Space Detective Pen names Lon Hosford Demoed
Screen shot of OpenAI application of Future Space Detective Pen names Lon Hosford Demoed

March 15, 2023 Tech Roundtable meeting on Zoom

Minutes

Several topics surrounding ChatGPT that uses the GPT-3 model and the release of GPT-4 model this week. Also the new Bing’s use of OpenAI was introduced and that it appears to already use GPT-4.

Voir dire of ChatGPT Source Data Quality

I presented a ChatGPT discussion I had that voir dired the validation. The inquiry probed on its usage of Wikipedia as a source. Wikipedia is an open source encyclopedia. The quality of the content depends on community input and that community consensus of thought. At first ChatGPT confirmed that does not validate the quality of such sources data. With further probing it gave a similar answer on how its data is processed to further the effort of cleaner accurate responses. It essentially was that because data comes from many sources such as Reddit, websites, books, etc. the AI would serve up the best results.

So in a nutshell the AI is only as good as the spectrum of its sources. At this point the AI is more limited to published materials available in public digital format over the internet and of sources the company chooses to include.

Analogies of ChatGPT Prompt to Response

Through a series of prompts I asked ChatGPT to provide analogies on the steps it goes through to process a prompt.

What is the first step that happens when ChatGPT processes a prompt. Use simple to understand terms but explain the technical steps.

What is the next step in using the tokens in simple but technical terms.

Is there a non technical analogy to describe this step.

Can you continue with this or a different analogy to explain the next step once it has the tokens and then provide a simple description of the process in technical terms.

Lon Hosford ChatGPT Prompt

The first analogy used a store where the prompt tokens become sort of shopping list to gather items. The second analogy used a puzzle to describe the assembly into a prompt. The chat session is available to those on the meetings mailing list by responding to the email address in your meeting notices.

OpenAI Platform

I also showed the group the OpenAI platform and how a new account receives a free $18.00 of usage.

Sample OpenAI Account Usage Report

Future Space Detective’s Pet Open AI Demo

I followed the OpenAI Quick Start guide that creates a pet naming demo based on a cat and dog. I modified it to consider a pet for a space detective in the future. Jack Sharp of the group added the Pangolin as a pet. The code prompt is as follows:

Suggest three names for an animal that works 
side by side with a detective in the future.

Animal: Pangolin
Names: Node, Electrode, Solid State
Animal: Cat
Names: Neutron, Proton, Wavelength
Animal: Hawk
Names: Drone, AI, Circuit
Animal: Dog
Names: Capacitor, Transistor, Electric

The app is a web page and appears as follows:

Screen shot of OpenAI application of Future Space Detective Pen names Lon Hosford Demoed
Screen shot of OpenAI application of Future Space Detective Pen names Lon Hosford Demoed

Business Use – Overcoming Communication Disability

I shared and article on a pool installer who had a disability impacting his communications with clients.

Ben Whittle, a pool installer and landscaper in rural England, worried his dyslexia would mess up his emails to new clients. Then one of his clients had an idea: Why not let a chatbot do the talking?

Washington Post

Ben’s tech consultant suggest the use of ChatGPT to help write email messages. Ben’s landing a $260,000 project was accredited to the AI assist. See the chat links for a link to the article.

It did stimulate discussion that we all could consider using the ChatGPT when writing important messages both professionally and personally. Perhaps your next holiday card message can come with the assist of AI?

GPT-4

The new release of GPT-4 by Open AI was demoed. Ken Powell curated a video for us to watch and provided another. Links to the videos and other GPT-4 content are in the meeting’s Chat Links section.

Overall the videos stimulated a lot of discussion and opinions on what it might mean to humans, work, software engineering. One common thread is that everyone needs to look at how AI is going to be a part of their business models.

GPT-4 is available to those who have the OpenAI $20/month Plus service. However there is wait list to get access.

New Bing

Bruce Arnold provided information on Bing and AI. Microsoft has a new Bing version that appears to be using the GPT-4 model.

New Bing Web Page

Right now you can preview it by getting on their wait list. See this meeting’s chat link list for details.

After Hours Segment

In the After Hours segment a video course on professional use of ChatGPT was introduced. I watched the Use ChatGPT to Develop a Learning Plan for New Skills Using AI | Easy Guided How-to Project lesson and thought it very useful. The links in this meeting’s chat links section takes you to the page listing all the lessons and the lesson I took. You certainly can find something useful there that will make ChatGPT useful to you.

Also some discussion of college dropout Sam Alltman one of the founders of OpenAi and some consider the father of ChatGPT. Perhaps his background and his promulgation of AI in our future might be a worthy discussion topic.

Also I demonstrated how to use various search engines from your web browser. Bing, Brave, DuckDuckGo, and Google were demoed for ChatGPT keyword and the SERPs, Search Engine Results Pages, were reviewed and compared.

Finally some musing about how money can be made from OpenAI was bandied about.

Chat Links

These are the links placed into the Zoom chat that were relevant to the discussion.

By Lon Hosford

Internet and Mobile Development Educator and Consultant Independent software developer with practical engineering project experience for clients such as AT&T, Avis, Bristol Myers Squibb, Ortho BioTech, Chanel, Avaya, Green Birdie Video, Aztec Learning Systems and Verizon Wireless. Lon is well known for translating client needs into useful applications. An interesting aspect of Lon's consulting work was the creation of industry jobs that did not exist before. That lead to hiring and training college students who were taught dead technologies at a time academia was woefully behind on the paradigm shifts in personal computing, the internet and today the distributed device environment often called mobile. Lon has taught thousands of students internet web development, animation and programming topics over two decades both privately and academically. He developed Multimedia Associated Degree program and courses for Raritan Valley Community College in the 1990s at a time when Macromedia Authorware and Director were tools. He is the founder, developer and educator for Raritan Valley Community College Web Developer Certification program also having its roots in the 1990s at the dawn of the internet. He also was a key curriculum developer and instructor for one of the Nation's first Web Developer Certification program offered through New Jersey Institute of Technology. Lon was also a technology instructor at the University of Phoenix Online. Lon over the years has produced educational video for topics including Paradox, Cobol, Java, Jasmine, C, C++, Linux, Flash, Cocos 2d and HTML. These courses were distributed and taught in Universities internationally when global was an emerging term.