KATHMANDU, JANUARY 11

Welcome. We are now in 2023. Last year in 2022, in a recent television interview after the Nepali general election results, the Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal said he was surprised by the election results and the leading cause. And he said, 'We cannot win the election just by stating we are working on making big infrastructure projects and political agendas for the country, but it seems we win if we have enriched the IT sector and know how to use social media better'.

It is good that our Nepali politicians are now talking about the importance of the IT sector, digitalisation and the rise of social media in our country. ChatGPT is one AI-based viral IT project recently launched by OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company which has caught the Internet by storm. ChatGPT is the best chatbot released to the general public, with over a million people using it within five days.

ChatGPT and the rise of AI is a new hotcake, and people from Twitterverse to Youtube and social media are talking about this now.

In addition, there is a chatter that people's jobs are at stake and may impact various sectors, from the public, judiciary, journalism, human rights to health and agriculture, among many other industries and vertical sectors.

ChatGPT can write an article and is good at answering questions you can commonly ask, giving suggestions and predictions about who will win the next elections. It can also help software programmers spot and fix errors in their code.

The next wave in IT is artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, most chatbots we see are mainly 'stateless', meaning they don't comprehend previous questions, e.g., your Siri in Apple iPhone or Alexa from Amazon. However, ChatGPT seems to remember the prior conversation, which may lead to innovation and a boom in Personalized Stress and Therapy Bots.

ChatGPT could be better, but currently, it is not perfect. The ChatGPT doesn't crawl the web for information, and its knowledge is restricted to things it learned before 2021, as a large language model is trained by OpenAI. Its training data include books, articles and websites on various topics.

Therefore, it has yet to have information about recent events or developments since then. It also cannot browse the Internet as it cannot provide information by looking up specific information. So expect it to answer questions only in its training data.

Research conducted by The Accenture Institute for High Performance shows that by 2035, the US will grow by 5 per cent compared to the present 3 per cent because of the use of AI technologies. However, in the Nepali market, only a few companies are working in the AI sector (for example, waiter robots).We have yet to move to avoid long queues or go paperless in public sectors, and there is a shortage of 'digitalisation' in most public and private sectors.

Nepal needs more policy-level intervention in AI, but using AI-based technologies in banks and health sectors shows that Nepal is still catching up in technological advancements. Nevertheless, we may benefit from the rise of AI and must adopt our policy accordingly by investing in this emerging field.

There are many forms of AI, and the exact number can vary depending on how AI is defined and classified.

Some common forms of AI include machine learning, natural language processing and robotics. Machine learning is a type of AI that involves training algorithms on large datasets to make predictions based on the data. This can include image recognition, speech recognition and language translation. Natural language processing is a type of AI that involves understanding and generating human language. This can include language translation, text summarisation and sentiment analysis.

Robotics is a type of AI that involves the design and control of robots. This can include tasks such as navigation, manipulation and object recognition. There are also many other subfields and applications of AI, such as computer vision, deep learning and evolutionary computation. The field of AI is constantly evolving and growing.

The AI that ChatGPT uses is based on unsupervised and semi-supervised machine learning algorithms, incredibly generative AI models that are diverse. For example, they can take images, longer text formats, emails, social media content, voice recordings, programme code and structured data. In addition, they can output new content, translations, answers to questions, sentiment analysis, summaries, and even videos.

AI is a powerful technology that has the potential to improve many aspects of our lives, such as healthcare, transportation and education. However, AI has limitations and can only solve some of humanity's challenges where sustainability is the key.

One of the critical limitations of AI is how good the quality of data and algorithms it is trained on is. This means that AI systems can only make predictions based on the information they have been given. Another limitation of AI is that it is incapable of creativity, empathy or other uniquely human traits. AI systems are designed to perform specific tasks, and they cannot think outside the box or understand complex human emotions.

A coalition of the CPN (Maoist), CPM(UML) and the National Independent Partyhas now formed a new government. Good that our politicians and policymakers are also starting to talk about using digital technology. The sooner they realise the rise of 'digitalisation' and the importance of the IT sector's role, the better it can boost the economy and provide better service delivery in Nepal.

Overall, while AI has the potential to help us solve many problems, it is only capable of solving some of humanity's challenges on its own. Therefore, it is essential to use AI responsibly and in combination with other technologies and approaches to achieve the best results.

A version of this article appears in the print on January 12, 2023, of The Himalayan Times.