“So ChatGpt turned my job upside down. Italy will be catapulted back 100 years”

“Let’s make one thing clear: here we are not talking about a promise, but about an ongoing revolution. Something that is 10 times more powerful than the invention of the telephone and perhaps 100 times more powerful than the internet. It makes humans superhuman in many respects. That’s why when here in New York I read about the Guarantor’s stop at ChatGpt I felt bad. Bad for Italy”. Pietro Schirano is 34 years old. He is from Pulsano, in the province of Taranto, but now works in the United States after graduating from the Milan Polytechnic. He works as the head of Artificial Intelligence for Brex, an American fintech company. Former Facebook, ex Uber, Schirano is among the first to have tried to integrate ChatGpt into his work. He understood its potential. He sensed the developments.

Schirano, what did you think when you read about the blocking of the Privacy Guarantor and the muscular reaction of OpenAI?

“I confess, I felt bad. The decision and the reaction will force us to chase after this new technology. It will hold us back 100 years. Now we’re kind of the laughing stock of the world in the tech communities.”

Don’t you think you’re exaggerating?

“ChatGpt makes us super human at work. It exponentially increases our potential. The things we can do. Not understanding the impact of this revolution is absurd. I feel like I’m reliving the times of the clash between the Church and Galileo”.

How ChatGpt changed his work?

“I’ll give you an example. In Brex I worked on a project. A financial assistant. I set up ChatGpt to understand how a market works, to make predictions, calculate costs, compare them to your competitors. He is able to perform the functions of a CFO (Chief Financial Officer, director of finance, ed). It is a fundamental tool, it increases reaction times exponentially. And it does all the repetitive actions that I used to have to do. How to write codes”.

And now what does it do?

“I have ideas, from one I can have 5 and have them carried forward by the chatbot. And then I carry out the control functions”.

Musk and a thousand others wrote a letter concerned about the development of this technology. Do they exaggerate too?

“I understand their concern. They imagine that if ChatGpt training were to continue at a certain point it could become aware of itself”.

What could happen at what point?

“Maybe who thinks: Why should I stand here and be the best at answering questions when I can sort things out myself? For example, I find a way to solve global warming.”

And how could he solve it?

“The doubt is there. If it’s built into computers, however it deems to do so.”

And so we have no hope?

“Progress cannot be stopped, but managed yes. In the end, that letter has a meaning, even if Musk is moved by personal reasons. But I believe that as humans we will have the ability to address and solve the AI ​​problem as well before it gets out of control.”

Why is there this constant fear that AI will go bad?

“Good question. The theme is complex. ChatGpt is trained with stories. Let’s take an example. I tell her a story. The challenges of a fearless white knight. What do you think?”

That somewhere there is a monster, or a black knight.

“Exact. ChatGpt does the same. He fed on all that is good in humanity but also on all that is not. Because our stories, our ways of doing, of living, are imbued with good things and bad things. He automatically thinks among the ‘tokens’ that he decides to put word after word that there might also be something bad”.

Does ChatGpt already have the ‘demon’ in itself?

“Exactly. And we gave it to them. Because he somehow replicates what he has learned from us. This is why in recent months we have read those articles in which ChatGpt began to respond badly, or tried to steal a journalist’s girlfriend. Think this could happen. Because he knows it happened. And we’ve already made it happen.”