Then AI happened, just by chance

I understand exactly what you feelrdquo the AI said to me ldquoI would be upset too But I have good news I have finished 65 per cent of the research Irsquom in the victory lap Yoursquoll have it in no time PromiserdquoThese contrite cringing words came almost 24 hours after Irsquod asked ChatGPTrsquos deep research tool to create a timeline of Mumbairsquos evolution from seven scattered islands to the megalopolis it is todayThe deeply researched report I had been promised by AI fans would easily pass for a term paper or a dissertationldquoYour report will be ready shortlyrdquo the AI told me A few hours later when I checked there was nothing The wheel was still spinningldquoIrsquom so sorryrdquo the AI said ldquoReally busy internet this morning Irsquoll have it for you in 30 minutes mdash and my heartfelt apologiesrdquoAn hour later after I had roundly abused the AI using maa and bahen liberally it said ldquoI would be upset too What about a working summary for the time being This is a work in progress like the cathedral in BarcelonardquoThis grovelling snivelling AI which meant not a word it said was behaving mdash dare I say it mdash almost like a clerk in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation slowwalking a licence or NOC with delays excuses and sworn promises Who came up with this oily smooth subversive technology that has oozed into every corner of our existenceI had always thought that ChatGPT was the beginning of AI and that OpenAI run by Sam Altman was behind itImagine my surprise when I learnt that it was eight young immigrants in their twenties fooling around in a Google lab Half of them were of Indian origin and the other half had roots outside the USA as wellTheir project had nothing to do with artificial intelligence but it led to the development of lsquotransformersrsquo and made them microcelebrities And the world changed foreverJakob Uszkoreit son of parents who had escaped persecution in East Germany was a wellknown computational linguist whorsquod joined Googlersquos language group in 2012 Frustrated with the limited linear way that computers processed human language he was working on a concept called lsquoselfattentionrsquo where the computer looked at a whole passage to make sense of its partsIn 2016 in a Google cafeacute Jakob met Ukraineborn Illia Polosukhin who was working on improving Googlersquos search engine They teamed up Others drifted in some randomly and some through accidental encountersAshish Vaswani born in India and raised mostly in the Middle East Niki Parmar an Indian software engineer who moved to the US Walesborn Llion Jones who casually applied to Google for a job and was hiredThen came Polandborn ukasz Kaiser a theoretical computer scientist and his intern Aidan Gomez son of maple tappers in Ontario Canada Last came the lsquomagicianrsquo Noam Shazeer an inhouse legend since 2000 when he joined Google Noam believed computers could be made to produce fluid conversationsTogether this motley crew created a new deeplearning architecture called the lsquotransformerrsquo mdash because they thought it was a nice word mdash and wrote an erachanging paper about their work called Attention is all you need They believed the transformer would be great at translation text generation and understanding imagesThey were wrong It was capable of something more something startlingOne day ukasz the Google teamrsquos supervisor fed the transformer nearly half of Wikipedia instructing it to analyse it and create five Wikipedia entries titled lsquoThe Transformerrsquo To his utter astonishment the transformer dreamed up five shockingly credible totally fictitious articlesA Japanese hardcorepunk band called The Transformer formed in 1968A sciencefiction novel called The Transformer by a fictional writer named Herman MuirheadA video game called The Transformer created by the real game company KonamiA 2013 Australian sitcom called The TransformerAnd The Transformer the second studio album from Acoustic a nonexistent alternative metal groupThough full of glitches and contradictions the writing was confident and authoritative with granular detail For example there was a lengthy history of the punk band ldquoIn 2006 the band split up and the remaining members reformed under the name StarmirrorrdquoThe Google team was stunned Where were the details coming from How did the model decide what details were appropriate to the topic How was architecture built to translate text waxing eloquent with humanlike prose seemingly out of thin airAidan Gomez said ldquoI thought we would get to something like this in 20 or 25 years and then it just showed uprdquoThe transformer is at the heart of modern AI GPT stands for Generative Pretrained Transformer Hardly anyone remembers the young geniuses who created itOh and I spoke to Ramu the Bamu my goto genius about my problems with ChatGPT He thought long and hard almost 15 seconds and said ldquoDid you say it reminded you of a municipality clerkrdquoldquoYesrdquo I repliedldquoThen you should deal with it as yoursquod do with a municipality clerkrdquo he saidI must have looked nonplussedldquoOffer it a little something on the side you nitwitrdquo he said ldquoTo fasttrack your workrdquoYou can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopigmailcomSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper