Wednesday, March 08, 2023

22 ways ChatGPT could be used in economics research


“We will remember this year as when AI triggered an explosion [in innovation],” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, which was the first venture firm to invest in ChatGPT-creator OpenAI in 2019. “Eighty per cent of economically valuable functions will be done by AI within 20 years” 


Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has led an investment of more than $200mn into generative artificial intelligence chatbot company Character.ai, marking the early internet pioneer’s first significant foray into the booming sector. The investment of between $200mn-$250mn values the company at about $1bn, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deal terms.

Character.ai uses large language models — the technology that underlies chatbot ChatGPT — to generate conversation in the style of various characters, including Tesla chief executive Elon Musk and Nintendo character Mario, from user prompts.

Chatbot Character.ai valued at $1bn in Andreessen-led funding round Pioneering tech venture capital firm makes first big foray into generative artificial intelligence sector


Start using InLinks' prompts based on entities and train ChatGPT to write better content!


VentureBeat: “OpenAI’s Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) has been the talk of the town since its launch in November 2022. The AI chatbot had more than a million users in just 4 days and surpassed 100 million active users in just two months — a milestone that took TikTok more than 9 months to reach.  However, its ability to understand the meaning and context of text inputs and provide almost human-like responses has caused consternation in a number of areas and industries in which original human-generated content is valued. 

This includes education, content marketing, publishing,  journalism and law. Their biggest questions are “How do we distinguish between AI and human-written text?” and “How can we detect AI-generated content?”…


Phind (formerly Hello) is a search engine that simply tells users what the answer is. Optimized for developers and technical questions, Phind instantly answers questions with simple explanations and relevant code snippets from the web. Phind is powered by large, proprietary AI language models. It’s smart enough to generate answers based on information from multiple sources. With Phind, finding information is as seamless and informative as talking to a friend.”



22 ways ChatGPT could be used in economics research Quartz: “Large language models (LLMs)—like ChatGPT—can help economists do better research, if they know how to use them correctly. This is part of the premise of a recent paper published in the National Bureau of Economic Research by Anton Korinek, an economics professor at the University of Virginia. To illustrate what LLMs could do in economics research, Korinek used the most powerful system available, which is currently GPT-3. 

This is “slightly more powerful” than ChatGPT but has a similar output, Korinek added. Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the GPT-3 system was trained on public data up until 2021 and cannot access the internet. Korinek sees research potential in LLMs because they can generate content and consume large amounts of text faster than humans. LLMs can produce text that sounds authoritative but may be inaccurate. Therefore, he says, humans—who are better at examining and evaluating the accuracy of content—should use them carefully. 

All of Korinek’s suggestions are related to “micro tasks”: small jobs that researchers do every day, but that are too minor to assign to other human assistants. “I have found that many of my students are already quite well-versed with ChatGPT and have used it for lots of different tasks,” Korinek said. “In fact, some of the examples in my paper were inspired by my students. And I also learned from my students that they use language models not only as assistants but also as tutors.” Korinek’s fellow faculty are more split on ChatGPT. Some use it as he does.

 Others dismiss it because of its faults, and others haven’t tried it.  “My goal in writing the article has been twofold: to expose the regular users of language models to a variety of different use cases and to try to win over some of the skeptics,” Korinek said. “I believe that we as a society have so much to gain if we use these tools responsibly to enhance our productivity and accelerate scientific progress.” Here are 22 of Korinek’s ideas for how economists can use the technology..”


Ars Technica: “On [February 27, 2023], researchers from Microsoft introducedKosmos-1, a multimodal model that can reportedly analyze images for content, solve visual puzzles, perform visual text recognition, pass visual IQ tests, and understand natural language instructions. 

The researchers believe multimodal AI—which integrates different modes of input such as text, audio, images, and video—is a key step to building artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can perform general tasks at the level of a human “Being a basic part of intelligence, multimodal perception is a necessity to achieve artificial general intelligence, in terms of knowledge acquisition and grounding to the real world,” the researchers write in their academic paperLanguage Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Models

Visual examples from the Kosmos-1 paper show the model analyzing images and answering questions about them, reading text from an image, writing captions for images, and taking a visual IQ test with 22–26 percent accuracy.

While the media buzzes with news about large language models (LLM), some AI experts point to multimodal AI as a potential path toward general artificial intelligence, a hypothetical technology that will ostensibly be able to replace humans at any intellectual task (and any intellectual job). AGI is the stated goal of OpenAI, a key business partner of Microsoft in the AI space…”



Descript: “For many creators, their first reaction to generative AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E is fear: fear that they’ll be replaced, or that human creativity will stop being valued. 

Those fears are valid, but there’s another way to frame this new AI-centered world we’re entering. That is, AI tools can free humans of creative blocks and mundane tasks so they can be morecreative.  In fact, there is a wide world of AI tools designed specifically to help specific kinds of creators free themselves from the tasks that slow them down and hamper their creativity. 

Are you a playwright who’s trying to come up with the next scene? Maybe a musician trying to mix up an overused chord progression? Or, ahem, a podcaster who needs to make a quick correction to something you already recorded? There are AI tools out there for you. Here’s a list of AI tools for creators. 

Note that, while we call it the “ultimate” list (partly to get you to click on it), it’s definitely not comprehensive; these tools are emerging and changing so fast it’s almost impossible to keep up. These are just the tools we’ve heard the most about, been the most curious about, and found the most useful so far. It should be plenty to get you started with AI, so dive in — and start putting the robots to work.

Another disclaimer: While different types of creators can certainly use tools outside of their wheelhouse — a podcaster generating AI music for an episode, for instance — it’s my view that when you can pay a fellow creative for their human work, you should. The result will almost always be better and more meaningful than AI can deliver.”