Parmy Olson, Columnist

ChatGPT Needs to Go to College. Will OpenAI Pay?

There’s money to be made on data used to train AI. That could make the next ChatGPT more expensive — and more dominant.

June 5, 2023 at 4:00 AM UTC

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.”

Get schooled.
Photographer: JOEL SAGET/AFP

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For all the intelligence that we like to ascribe to ChatGPT, the chatbot was essentially homeschooled. Its creator OpenAI trained it on the vast, imperfect glory of the public internet — one reason why ChatGPT makes so many embarrassing mistakes. A lawyer who recently used the chatbot to write his court brief realized he’d blundered when it cited six nonexistent cases.

How can ChatGPT get more accurate? Send it to college by training it on better-quality data.