ChatGPT mania has swept the globe in recent weeks, with the advanced AI-powered chatbot gaining world fame and securing a $10 billion investment from Microsoft.
But coupled with developments in the storage of personal information, the technology can go so much further, according to the inventor of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee, who envisions everyone in the future being able to have a ChatGPT-style personal assistant.
Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web in 1989, told CNBC’s Beyond the Valley podcast in an episode released Friday that his new start-up envisions people having online “pods.” , where all their personal information is stored has been stored.
Berners-Lee co-founded Inrupt, a start-up company that aims to provide web users with a single login that can be used on different websites on the internet. As part of its work on developing this technology, Inrupt wants to store each user’s data in digital containers.
The so-called pods could be used to give websites or services access to some or all of an individual’s personal information, from sleeping habits to shopping preferences.
Once they become a reality, an advanced AI-powered chatbot — similar to the AI phenomenon ChatGPT — could use the data pods to act as a digital personal assistant, Berners-Lee suggested.
“We call it Charlie,” he said. “Charlie is an AI working for you.”
Berners-Lee said that unlike other virtual assistants — like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri — the chatbot he envisioned would not be affiliated with Big Tech. It would legally “work” for its user, he explained, just like an agent or a lawyer.
“In this case, if [Charlie] really works for me, i will trust [it] with all my data and expect [it] to be a lot more insightful,” he said.
“This AI will see in your pods everything you bought from Amazon, but also your diet – everything you ate – your fitness data and [so on]. So if you run an AI on your pod, it’s going to have access to a lot more cool things than any of the individual things like Siri or Alexa that operate through those silos [where] they are limited.”
Thanks to ChatGPT’s monumental launch, an AI arms race between tech giants Microsoft and Google has intensified, with the latter’s bot recently making a $100 billion blunder.
Berners-Lee said in Friday’s episode “Beyond the Valley” that an AI bot’s performance “is all dependent on the data.”
“People have been able to run AI on public and clinical data, [but if it has] All the data related to your collaboration and your coffee and your projects and your dreams and the books you read your whole life is in your pod [and] They run AI on it, that might be cute,” he told CNBC.
Berners-Lee isn’t the only computer pioneer who sees big things in the future of ChatGPT and similarly designed AI bots.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates declared earlier this month that the technology “will change our world,” while the tech giant’s CEO Satya Nadella believes AI could help humanity create a “utopia.”
However, ChatGPT – which has been integrated with Microsoft’s Bing search engine and is currently being tested by select users – is not without its problems and may still have a long way to go before it can be a trusted personal assistant.
Recent tests of the tech showed the chatbot became “unhinged” and argumentative, some users said, while the bot told others it wanted to “stay alive” and “escape the chatbox.”
