ChatGPT is high-tech progress, not a revolution

ChatGPT is a powerful chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November 2022.     1     (build) on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of large language models, it engages in human-like dialogue egged by prompting. It     2     (design) to respond in a natural, intuitive way and has numerous potential uses.

From a scientific point of view, there is a need to closely watch the development of such     3    (technology) before reaching a conclusion about their efficacy and helpful nature. Technology progresses step by step. So we should not panic thinking ChatGPT will take up jobs     4     till now need humans to fulfill.

ChatGPT is an example of high-tech progress, not a revolution.

First, ChatGTP     5     (make) quite some progress in natural language processing, yet it still has a long way to go to completely understand the human mind and language faculty, because when it comes to professional writing, ChatGPT at times writes plausible-sounding but     6     (correct) or nonsensical answers. It might give some good answers to most of the general questions,     7     it is no substitute for professional advice, such as medical prognosis and prescriptions, or legal advice.

Second, ChatGPT is still a product     8     very limited application. It has the potential to be used for enhancing search engine functionality but, as a pre-trained language model, it will have limited use.

Due to these limitations, investors should not     9    (blind) invest huge amounts to further develop ChatGPT and should not expect quick returns on investment. Yet as a     10    (promise) AI development, ChatGPT is likely to advance in the medium, if not the short term.

4 . We live in a town with three beaches. There are two parts less than 10 minutes’ walk from home where neighborhood children gather to play. However, what my children want to do after school is pick up a screen — any screen — and stare at it for hours. They are not alone. Today’s children spend an average of four and a half hours a day looking at screens, split between watching television and using the Internet.

In the past few years, an increasing number of people and organisations have begun coming up with plans to counter this trend. A couple of years ago film-maker David Bond realised that his children, then aged five and three, were attached to screens to the point where he was able to say “chocolate” into his three-year-old son’s ear without getting a response. He realised that something needed to change, and, being a London media type, appointed himself “marketing director from Nature”. He documented his journey as he set about treating nature as a brand to be marketed to young people. The result was Project Wild Thing, a film which charts the birth of the World Network, a group of organisations with the common goal of getting children out into nature.

“Just five more minutes outdoors can make a difference,” David Bond says. “There is a lot of really interesting evidence which seems to be suggesting that if children are inspired up to the age of seven, then being outdoors will be on habit for life.” His own children have got into the habit of playing outside now: “We just send them out into the garden and tell them not to come back in for a while.”

Summer is upon us. There is an amazing world out there, and it needs our children as much as they need it. Let us get them out and let them play.

7 . For years, David James, who studies insects at Washington State University, had wanted to examine the migration (迁徙)patterns of West Coast monarch butterflies (黑脉金斑蝶). The route the butterflies travel has been hardly known because the populations are too small to follow. For every 200 monarchs tagged (打标签)by a researcher, only one is usually recovered at the end of its trip, James says, and finding even 200 in the wild to tag is unlikely. Knowing the route is vital to conservation efforts, but James had no way to figure it out- until he got a phone call from Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.

The prison was looking for new activities to improve the mental health of those serving long-term sentences. So James began working with prisoners to raise monarchs through the whole process of their transformation. The adult insects were then tagged and released from the prison. Over five years, nearly 10, 000 monarchs flew from the facility. Elsewhere in Washington, Oregon and Idaho, researchers released another few thousand.

The tags included email addresses, and soon after the first butterflies took off, James started receiving messages from people who had spotted them. The butterflies, the reports confirmed, wintered in coastal California. Twelve of them landed at Lighthouse Field State Beach in Santa Cruz. Several more headed to Bolinas and Morro Bay.

The work helps researchers identify ideal places to plant milkweed and other vegetation that are important to the life cycle of West Coast monarch butterflies. It also brought out the gentler side of some of the prisoners. “They were very worried that they were going to harm the butterflies, ”James says. Watching the monarch change their form also touched the men. “This butterfly changed, ” James recalls prisoners telling him, “and maybe we can too. ”

8 . My mother is 92. Unless I have to be out of town, each week I take my mother to do her _______ and visit the doctor, providing _______ and transportation. During the week, however, she likes to go to a nearby store to _______ some small things she needs.

Last week she walked up to the store, but when she went to pay for her groceries, she was _______ about three dollars. The only _______ to pay for the groceries was to take off the _______ she could do without: a bottle of rubbing alcohol (医用酒精) and a bar of soap. By taking off these, she was able to _______ the new total to the amount of cash she had with her.

At this store, people _______ and then go off to the side to _______ their own groceries. My mother was putting her groceries into shopping bags when a ________ came up to her and said, “Here are the things that you ________ .” handing her the rubbing alcohol and the ________ . My mother, who is never speechless, was speechless. She ________ for the woman’s name and address so that she could ________ her. The woman told her it was her ________ .

My mother was so ________ by her gesture that she decided to go back to the store and give the cashier (收银员) a five-dollar bill to keep on hand ________ the same happened to someone else if they didn’t have enough ________ for all of their groceries.

So, whoever you are, thank you for the random act of ________ that not only helped my mother out, but ________ too.

9 . Quantum ( 量子 ) computers have been on my mind a lot lately. A friend has been sending me articles on how quantum computers might help solve some of the biggest challenges we face as humans. I’ve also had exchanges with two quantum-computing experts. One is computer scientist Chris Johnson who I see as someone who helps keep the field honest. The other is physicist Philip Taylor.

For decades, quantum computing has been little more than a laboratory curiosity. Now, big tech companies have invested in quantum computing, as have many smaller ones. According to Business Weekly, quantum machines could help us “cure cancer, and even take steps to turn climate change in the opposite direction.” This is the sort of hype ( 炒作 ) that annoys Johnson. He worries that researchers are making promises they can’t keep. “What’s new,” Johnson wrote, “is that millions of dollars are now potentially available to quantum computing researchers.”

As quantum computing attracts more attention and funding, researchers may mislead investors, journalists, the public and, worst of all, themselves about their work’s potential. If researchers can’t keep their promises, excitement might give way to doubt, disappointment and anger, Johnson warns. Lots of other technologies have gone through stages of excitement. But something about quantum computing makes it especially prone to hype, Johnson suggests, perhaps because “‘quantum’ stands for something cool you shouldn’t be able to understand.” And that brings me back to Taylor, who suggested that I read his book Q for Quantum.

After I read the book, Taylor patiently answered my questions about it. He also answered my questions about PyQuantum, the firm he co-founded in 2016. Taylor shares Johnson’s concerns about hype, but he says those concerns do not apply to PyQuantum.

The company, he says, is closer than any other firm “by a very large margin ( 幅度 )” to building a “useful” quantum computer, one that “solves an impactful problem that we would not have been able to solve otherwise.” He adds, “People will naturally discount my opinions, but I have spent a lot of time quantitatively comparing what we are doing with others.”

Could PyQuantum really be leading all the competition “by a wide margin”, as Taylor claims? I don’t know. I’m certainly not going to advise my friend or anyone else to invest in quantum computers. But I trust Taylor, just as I trust Johnson.