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First, they are programmed for specific tasks. (Examples OpenAI has created include “Creative Writing Coach” and “Mocktail Mixologist,” a bot that suggests recipes for non-alcoholic drinks.) Second, the bots can draw on private data, such as a company’s internal HR documents or a real estate listing database. and incorporate this data into their responses. Third, if you give them the chance, the bots can connect to other parts of your online life (your calendar, your to-do list, your Slack account) and take actions using your login credentials.
Sound scary? If you ask some AI safety researchers, they worry that giving bots more autonomy could lead to disaster. The Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit research organization, named autonomous agents one of the “catastrophic AI risks” this year, saying that “malicious actors could deliberately create rogue AIs with dangerous goals.”
But there’s money to be made with AI assistants that can perform useful tasks for humans, and enterprise customers are eager to train chatbots based on their own data. There’s also an argument that AI won’t be truly useful until it truly understands its users: their communication styles, their likes and dislikes, what they watch and what they shop for online.
So here we are, entering the age of the autonomous AI agent – doomers be damned.
To be fair, OpenAI’s bots aren’t particularly dangerous. I got a demo of several GPTs on Monday at the company’s developer conference in San Francisco, and they automated largely innocuous tasks like creating coloring pages for kids or explaining the rules of card games.
Custom GPTs can’t really do much yet either, except search through documents and connect to common apps. A demo I saw on Monday involved an OpenAI employee asking a GPT to look up conflicting meetings in her Google calendar and send a Slack message to her boss. Another happened on stage when Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, built a “start-up mentor” chatbot to provide advice to aspiring founders, based on an uploaded file of a speech he had given years earlier.
