A Glimpse into the Future: GPT-4 as an AI Personal Assistant
Can GPT-4 book flights for a wedding? Let’s find out!
Hey there, language model enthusiasts! Today, we’ll dive into an exciting experiment with the latest language model sensation, GPT-4, as an AI personal assistant. We all know how useful AI personal assistants can be, but let’s see if GPT-4 can help us book flights for a wedding. Spoiler alert: It gets pretty interesting!
Our experiment began with a simple item on my personal to-do list: “Book my flights for James’s wedding.” I’d been putting this off for ages. Looking up flights is only a minor faff, but there were various factors involved — I needed to get there by a certain time on the Friday, I didn’t want to leave too early on the Sunday, I didn’t want to have to take too much time off work…etc
Naturally, I took this as an opportunity to outsource something from my own brain to an AI. I was curious to see whether it would be possible to engineer a prompt (along the lines of those published in the research paper introducing GPT-4) that would get chatGPT to do some of the heavy lifting for me.
This is the first thing I came up with:
Kind of amazingly, the AI nailed it first time with this. It started by breaking the task into thoughtful steps and actions, and requested a calendar search to find the event I was talking about:
It parsed my hypothetical API response and instigated an action to look up some information about my preferred departure city (in this thought experiment, I’m imagining I’ve got this saved in a vector search database or similar that the AI can query):
That address was just copy-pasted from Google maps — I love that it recognised that the nearest major airport was Edinburgh. It then searched for flights from London to Edinburgh, taking that information into account.
At this point I had to get a bit creative with making up my own JSON-like response. In reality, we could easily get GPT-4 itself to help us write a function to query something like the Kayak or Skyscanner API and parse the actual results.
What I particularly liked was that I could then just give it some brain dump thoughts about my preferences, and it came back with a pretty thoughtful recommendation:
Big fan of the slightly deadpan “your plans for late-night dancing”.
And there you have it! Once ChatGPT Plugins (or similar tools based on functionality like langchain) become more widely available, I think we might expect properly automated versions of this kind of thought experiment to become a regular part of our daily lives. If someone somewhere can just really nail all the privacy and security risks this kind of functionality would bring, then I personally would absolutely love to have an AI assistant available like this.
Although we could probably have more fun with a couple of tweaks:
It’s impressive to see GPT-4 adapt to the role of an AI personal assistant and provide useful information based on user inputs. However, it’s important to consider the opportunities and risks associated with such technology.
Opportunities:
- Improved efficiency: GPT-4 can streamline tasks, like booking flights or scheduling appointments, saving users valuable time.
- Enhanced user experience: By understanding context and user preferences, GPT-4 can offer personalized recommendations.
- Adaptability: GPT-4’s ability to switch roles (from personal assistant to data scientist) demonstrates its versatility.
Risks:
- Misinterpretation: GPT-4 might misunderstand complex instructions or provide inaccurate information.
- Overreliance: Users might become overly dependent on AI assistants, resulting in a decline in problem-solving skills.
- Privacy concerns: Sharing personal information with AI assistants could raise privacy issues.
In conclusion, our experiment showcases GPT-4’s potential as an AI personal assistant. However, we must be cautious when embracing new technologies, balancing the benefits with the risks. As always, the key is to use AI responsibly and ethically, harnessing its power for good.
Stay tuned for more fascinating AI insights, and don’t forget to share your thoughts in the comments below!
