So, for example, ask it questions like 'Can osteoporosis be reversed?' and 'Is jumping good for bone health?' and you'll get concise and coherent (and seemingly accurate) answers that link out to content the startup hosts on its website (written by its in-house experts) for further related reading on your query. Or, well, so long as you stay in its expertise lane of all-things bone health. Testing out this chatbot, which is clearly labeled as an 'experiment' - and before you even start interacting with it you have to acknowledge an additional disclaimer emphasizing that its output is 'not medical advice' - ahead of its launch today it brought to mind a little of the utility of the 'Snow Crash' librarian. OpenAI launches an API for ChatGPT, plus dedicated capacity for enterprise customers So foundational large language models (LLMs), like OpenAI's GPT, are - via its API - being customized by other businesses by being trained on specialist datasets for the purpose of being applied in a specific (i.e., not general purpose) context.Īnd, in the best examples, these custom chatbots are instructed to keep their responses concise (no waffling, pls!), as well as being mandated to show some basic workings (by including links to reference material) as a backstop against inadvertently misleading information-hungry human interlocutors (who may themselves be prone to hallucinating or seeing what they want to see).

While we're still far from the strong knowledge dissemination game of the 'Snow Crash' librarian, we are seeing custom chatbots being honed for utility in a narrower context, where they essentially function as a less tedious website search. So it turns out the reality of cutting-edge AI tools is a lot wonkier than some of our finest fictional predictions. When asked something it did not explicitly have information on, it would 'fess up' to a knowledge gap, rather than resorting to making stuff up. The version of a conversational AI in 'Snow Crash' was almost unfailingly helpful and certainly did not routinely 'hallucinate' (wrong) answers. But there's one major drawback: These general-purpose tools are failing to achieve the high level of response-accuracy envisaged in science fiction. The fictional concept suggested an elegant and accessible solution to the knowledge discovery problem, just so long as the answer to whatever query it was being asked lurked in its training data.įast-forward to today and AI chatbots are popping up everywhere.

What are AI chatbots good for? Lovers of sci-fi novels may recall the 'librarian,' a character in Neal Stephenson's 1992 classic 'Snow Crash' - not a person but an AI program and virtual library that was capable of interacting with users in a conversational manner.

Snowcrash audible