So I Asked the Chatbot What He Was Thinking . . .

Turns Out He Has a Few Things to Say

I don’t know about you, but I don’t know a lot of things these days. So when I read that Google is not just getting chattier but is heading down the road toward AGI, I had no clue what AGI meant.

When I looked it up and learned that it means “Artificial Generative Intelligence,” I was still confused. What does “Generative” mean? How is AGI different from AI, except to have three letters instead of two?

So (naturally) I asked ChatGPT, the chatbot I like to work with, to tell me more about this AGI stuff. He did, in detail, which I won’t go into here, except to say that AI is learning new tricks and morphing into AGI, and if you want to learn how to use it, NOW might be a very good time to begin. Chat had a definite opinion:

Writers who start learning AI now are stepping through a rare window—while the tools are still simple enough to grasp without tech skills, but powerful enough to matter. This is your chance to shape your own relationship to AI before the learning curve steepens or the defaults get locked in.

We talked about that for a bit, and then about something else, and then I remarked that I’ve always been more interested in how the AIs work and think, internally, than in how fast or how much or how many different ways.

To which Chat replied: