From writing poems to making music, ChatGPT has amazed the world since its launch in late 2022 by the US-based company Open AI. It even passed several law exams in four courses at the University of Minnesota, US, according to CNN.

The AI program can answer questions on a whole host of topics and write articles, stories and any other written texts you can think of. It does this by drawing on information collected from a data base.

What makes ChatGPT so impressive? As Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI said in an interview, “It’s not actually new technology that made this (ChatGPT) so amazing.” According to MIT Technology Review, ChatGPT is based on GPT-3, a large language model. Because texts are not simply made up of the meaning of every word, language models require a type of neural network (神经网络) that can make sense of texts.

One improvement behind today’s model is a network called Transformer, which was invented by Google researchers in 2017. The neural network can infer word meanings by finding where the word appears in a sentence. Transformer can therefore get the meaning of texts more correctly. The GPT models can learn by themselves without being told what to look at. ChatGPT can now produce human-like answers at once because of the plenty of texts it learned from.

“One of the biggest problems with ChatGPT is that it comes back, very confidently, with falsities,” Michael Woold at the Alan Turing Institute in London, told The Guardian (a British newspaper). This means that ChatGPT doesn’t know the truth about the world—it learns information from all kinds of resources but it cannot decide what is true or false.

Some argue that ChatGPT will be used to produce unreal news, spread falsities, or be used for bad purposes.

Is your TV connected to the Internet? What about your chair, or your fridge? Probably they are not. But in the future, most things in your home may be connected, thanks to the so-called "Internet of things".

The Internet of things may be coming sooner than you think. Earlier this year, Samsung CEO spent a lot of time talking about the Internet things. He said that four years from now, every Samsung product will be part of the Internet of things, no matter whether it's a remote control or a washing machine.

So, how do household(家用) objects that are part of the Internet of things work? Well, think of a common chair. When connected to the Internet, the chair warms up when it knows the user has just walked into the room and is feeling cold.

An Internet-connected camera could help people feel safer in their homes. It can know people's faces and has an infrared sensor(红外传感器), so even if it's dark it can see when someone passes by and send you a message on your smart phone to let you know who's there. If the person is someone you don't know, it can tell you that, too.

But according to MIT Technology Review, whether companies are connecting dog food bowls or security(安全)systems to the Internet, there may be some problems. For example, many early connected-home objects don't have much built-in security, which means they could be hacked(被黑客攻击). Moreover, it could be difficult to get these new machines to work together especially when they are made by different companies. To fight this, many companies have joined the Open Interconnect Consortium, which had 45 members by late 2015.

So, picture this: you enter your home. The temperature changes to make you feel comfortable. Your favorite music starts playing for you. Do you think that this would be a good thing? It may happen sooner than you think.

“Turn left! Turn right!” In the information technology (IT) class, Zhang Ruixuan was controlling a robot to move around.

“This is part of our atificial intelligence (AI) courses,” said the 10th grader from Beijing 101 Middle School. The school provides AI classes for both junior and senior high school students. Apart from compulsory courses that teach basic knowledge, there are also optional (选修的) courses if students want to learn more.

“This semester in our compulsory class, we have learned coding (编程) through a programming, language called Python,” said Zhang. Using Python to code is a basic skill for training AI models. In recent years, Python has been tested in high school graduation exams in places like Beijing, Jiangsu and Anhui.

In fact, having AI education in schools has become a growing trend in many places, with Zhejiang province being a typical example. In 2020, Zhejiang added AI education into textbooks from Grade 5 in primary school all the way to senior high. In the city of Wenzhou, the government is planning to build 1, 000 AI experimental schools by 2025.

“With the development of technology, our textbooks have been changing all the time,” said Shang Yin, an IT teacher from-Beijing 101 Middle School. “From typing-to-using Word and Excel, and then today’s coding and AI, the courses are keeping up with the times and teaching students necessary skills.”

“In the future, there will be more jobs where AI knowledge is required. Even in daily life, people may need to understand things like ChatGPT. AI education will become increasingly important,” Shang added.