#4 - Wednesday February 08, 2023

Welcome to Beyond the Screen, with your host, Frank Nanninga. On this podcast, we explore the frontiers of artificial intelligence, chatbot technology, and augmented reality and how they are transforming our lives. Every episode, we'll dive into the new and exciting developments in these fields, and the implications they have on our world. So, let's get started and go Beyond the Screen. Microsoft has introduced an upgraded version of its search engine Bing, powered by the AI technology behind the chatbot ChatGPT. The company is also launching new AI-enhanced features for its Edge browser that it says will provide a better experience for web browsing and online information search. The new Bing can offer comments and insights based on users' web searches, and can even answer questions about recent events. The search engine is powered by an upgraded version of the AI language model GPT 3.5, which Microsoft calls the "Prometheus Model." The Edge browser will have "chat" and "compose" features that will offer writing assistance and summarize content on webpages. Google has launched its AI chatbot Bard, a rival to OpenAI's ChatGPT, but the bot's first demo has received criticism from experts who pointed out a factual error. Bard was asked "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year-old about?" and responded with incorrect information that the telescope took the first image of a planet outside of our solar system. The error highlights the issue with AI chatbots, which often "hallucinate" and state false information as fact. Google has stated the importance of a rigorous testing process, which they will begin this week with their Trusted Tester program. China's internet giant Baidu has announced the launch of a generative AI chatbot later this year. The bot, called  "ERNIE Bot" in English, is based on the Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration (Ernie) model and is capable of language understanding, language generation, and text-to-image generation. Baidu has over the years aimed to create a system similar to ChatGPT, which uses a 175-billion parameter GPT3 model. ERNIE is bilingual in English and Chinese and is considered superior to all other language models, including GPT-3. Baidu's announcement has caused a surge in its share price. A new article is addressing the environmental impact of large scale machine learning models, specifically the carbon footprint of ChatGPT. The article highlights the significance of the information and communications technology (ICT) sector and data center industry in the contribution towards greenhouse gas emissions, which are a major factor in climate change. The article discusses the need for awareness that digital products, including machine learning models, require energy and therefore have a carbon footprint. It suggests that developers of machine learning models should disclose energy consumption and carbon footprint information, to assess their performance. The carbon footprint of ChatGPT is estimated based on a guesstimate, using data from similar models and a ML CO2 Impact calculator. The daily carbon footprint of ChatGPT is estimated to be 23.04 kgCO2e, equivalent to 0.2% of the annual carbon footprint of an average Dane.