Disclaimer: Views in this blog do not promote, and are not directly connected to any L&G product or service. Views are from a range of L&G investment professionals, may be specific to an author’s particular investment region or desk, and do not necessarily reflect the views of L&G. For investment professionals only.
AI: A new division of labour?
ChatGPT’s launch back in late-2022 seems inauspicious in hindsight. The tool, which was powered by OpenAI’s* GPT-3.5 model, couldn’t tell the time properly, or follow a game of tic-tac toe. And yet its release, not even four years ago, birthed an artificial
intelligence (AI) rush that’s among global macro’s most important trends. Yet underlying it lies the solution to a simple problem computer scientists have wrestled with for decades.
Computers are known to solve well-understood processing problems (say, multiplication) quickly. But while they were very good at calculation, they always needed a well-specified algorithm, which many human-level skills (recognising a friend on the street, translating a language) just don’t have. Although computers have improved substantially over the last 80 years and are now central to modern life, getting them to perform these higherorder tasks proved elusive.
That clear separation of tasks that computers could and could not do is now broken. Today’s large language models (LLMs) are now capable not just of replicating human outputs in language and images, but operating computers, conducting scientific research and interacting with one another. Regardless of your view on AI, the pace of improvement in recent years has been extraordinary.
*For illustrative purposes only. Reference to a particular security is on a historic basis and does not mean that the security is currently held or will be held within an L&G portfolio. The above information does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any security.
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