ChatGPT's launch late last year sent a rocket up humanity's backside: machines are now able to communicate in a way pretty much indistinguishable from humans. Pre-trained on a trillion "tokens," this little language model had a certain amount of capability baked in – but it would lag significantly behind ChatGPT in most tasks; the chief cost, and indeed the chief competitive advantage, in the GPT models comes largely from the enormous amount of time and manpower OpenAI has put into post-training. It also muddies the water for commercial AI companies working to develop their own language models; if so much of the time and expense involved is incurred in the post-training phase, and this work can be more or less stolen in the time it takes to answer 50 or 100,000 questions, does it make sense for companies to keep spending this cash?And for the rest of us, well, it's hard to say, but the awesome capabilities of this software could certainly be of use to an authoritarian regime, or a phishing operation, or a spammer, or any number of other dodgy individuals