The Revere

By Sophia Tabibian’26

In 1950, mathematician Alan Turing published Computer Machinery and Intelligence, the first paper to introduce the Turing test: an assessment of a machine’s capability compared to human intelligence. Five years later, American computer scientist John MacCarthy delivered a presentation at Dartmouth College, the first workshop to use the term “artificial intelligence.” From 1955 to 1979, AI research and development grew significantly: scientists built new programming languages; engineers created the first anthropomorphic robots and self-driving cars; and multimedia platforms documented these innovations. Rapid growth continued in the 1980s, with the first conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) held at Stanford and the Japanese government providing over $2 billion real dollars to the Fifth Generation Computer Project. Despite a lack of both government and private funding for the next decades, the Deep Blue — the first supercomputer to beat world Chess Champion Gary Kasparov — revived interest in the funding and development of AI in the early 2000s. Now, in 2023, artificial intelligence is the most fast-growing and powerful it has ever been. Among several innovations, Open AI’s Chat GPT is undeniably one of the most well-known and widely-used developments today. However, this surge in popularity has given rise to important questions about the patentability, economic implications, and ethical concerns of such a powerful chatbot.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 by several technologists, including Elon Musk and Sam Altman — who serves as the CEO of the company. Just three years later, Elon Musk resigned from the Board of Directors and continues to condemn the company for its “dangerously good” programs. In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, with the hopes of competing with Google’s DeepMind AI company. Furthermore, the tech giant plans on investing at least $10 billion more in the future. Although OpenAI used to be a non-profit, in 2020, Sam Altman announced that it would become a “capped profit,” meaning that investors’ earnings are limited to 100 times their investment. Over the past eight years, OpenAI has created several innovations including Gym, Universe, and Dall-E. Its most popular program, ChatGPT, was built with Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, a language developed by OpenAI that can interpret and respond to a variety of user inputs. The first version of ChatGPT was developed in 2018, with 177 million parameters (or data points). Then, in 2020, ChatGPT-3 was released, with 175 billion parameters – one of the largest models in existence. Finally, Chat GPT-4 was released on March 14. With over one trillion parameters, the program has unmatched abilities to learn from data and interactions. However, ChatGPT-4 is not free, and it still has many processing limitations.

ChatGPT is an open-source program, meaning users can view and alter the bot’s software. However, a patent prevents others from using an invention for a limited period of time, generally 20 years. Thus, obtaining a patent would challenge ChatGPT’s “free to use” policy. Additionally, ChatGPT would have to pass the Section 3(k) of the India Patents Act. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization, “Under this provision (Section 3 (k)), mathematical methods, business methods, computer programmes per se and algorithms are not considered as patentable inventions.” Since ChatGPT can be downloaded onto multiple different devices, the Patent Office could argue that it is a “computer program per se or algorithm.” Furthermore, patents require that the invention possess novelty, inventive step, and industrial applicability. Due to ChatGPT’s public algorithms and previous models, it is difficult to determine the current invention as an “inventive step” and “novel” compared to its recent predecessors. Patent protections prevent competitors from taking advantage of a company’s invention. They also grant investors security, demonstrating the company’s legal control over their innovation. Emerging ChatGPT competitors include Amazon’s new language model, Google Bard, and DeepMind Sparrow. While some of these programs outperform ChatGPT on specific processing aspects, ChatGPT continues to be the most popular AI chatbot.

ChatGPT’s global prominence poses both positive and negative economic impacts. Firstly, AI has been proven to boost productivity across multiple industries: creators can generate greater amounts of media for public use; scientists can save time from processing and analyzing large data sets; chatbots can promote sustainable products and services; and personal course plans can be designed for students. Perhaps the most affected sector is entrepreneurship. Automated tech support, efficient content creation, and Udemy skill training could lead to an abundance of startups, services, and products. However, an analysis by OpenAI’s Tyna Eloundou, Sam Manning, and Pamela Mishkin found that large language AI models could affect 80% of the US workforce — heavily affecting 19 percent of jobs, with at least 50 percent of the tasks in those jobs “exposed.” Instead of increasing productivity for employees, companies could initiate large-scale unemployment. Many well-paying jobs could be replaced with automation, leaving the only option low-paying service jobs. Among the most vulnerable are writers, artists, graphic designers, financial analysts, and blockchain engineers. 

Therefore, the economic implications of ChatGPT depend on how companies use the chatbot. Corporations have two options: 1) to use ChatGPT to increase skill development and employee productivity, or 2) to gradually replace employees doing AI-capable tasks with ChatGPT. According to Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson, “The pursuit of human-like capabilities has led to technologies that simply replace people with machines, driving down wages and exacerbating inequality of wealth and income.” Brynjolfsson believes companies must “stay away from the mentality of thinking that humans aren’t needed.” In order to ensure that all people — not just tech billionaires and large companies — benefit from AI, government policies, tax reforms, and funding may be needed. Some extremists even recommend a universal basic income. Regardless, many thinkers have encouraged individuals to place pressure on governments and corporations to ensure that the benefits from autonomy will be felt by people at all ends of the economic spectrum. 

As Tim Cook said, “What all of us have to do is to make sure we are using AI in a way that is for the benefit of humanity, not to the detriment of humanity.” It is unclear what lies ahead for AI, but one thing is certain: the technology will not go away any time soon.