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ChatGPT, an AI chatbot launched this fall, allows users to ask for help with things such as writing essays, drafting business plans, generating code, and even composing music. As of Dec. 4, ChatGPT already had over 1 million users.

Open AI built its auto-generative system on a model called GPT 3, which is trained on billions of tokens. These tokens, used for natural language processing, are similar to words in a paragraph. For comparisons sake, the novel Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has about 250,000 words and 185,000 tokens. Essentially, ChatGPT has been trained on billions of data points, making this kind of intelligent machine possible.

Jia noted the importance of data quality and how it can impact machine learning results.

If you have bad data feeding into machine learning, you will get bad results, said Jia. We call that 'garbage in, garbage out.' We want to get an understanding, especially a quantitative understanding, of which data is more valuable and which is less valuable for the purpose of data selection.

The importance of more quality-based data has been noticed by ChatGPT developers as they just announced the release of GPT-4. The latest technology is multimodal, meaning images as well as text prompts can spur it to generate content.

A large amount of data is required to develop this type of machine intelligence, but not all data is open sourced or public. Some data sets are owned by private entities and there is privacy involved. Jia hopes that in the future, monetary incentives can be introduced to help acquire these types of data sets and improve the machine learning algorithms that are needed in all industries.

The University of California-Berkeley grad has had conversations with Google Research and Sony AI Research, among others, who are interested in the research benefits. Jia hopes these companies will adopt the technology developed and serve as advocates for data sharing. Sharing data and adopting improved machine learning algorithms will greatly benefit not only industries but individual consumers as well. For instance, if youve ever had a bad experience with a customer service chatbot, youve experienced low-quality data and poor machine learning algorithm design.

Jia hopes to use her background and area expertise to improve these web-based interactions for all. As a school-aged child, Jia always enjoyed math and science, but her decision to enter the electrical and computer engineering field stemmed from her desire to help people.

Both of my parents are doctors. It was amazing to grow up seeing them help patients with some kind of medical formula, said Jia. Thats why I chose to study math and science. You can have a concrete impact. Im using a different kind of formula to help, but I like that pursuing this career has made me feel like I can make a difference in someones life.

The CAREER award is the National Science Foundations most prestigious award for early-career faculty with the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in their organizations mission. Throughout this project, Jia has demonstrated her desire to serve as an academic role model for graduate, undergraduate, and even K-12 students.

She is a core faculty in theSanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, formerly known as the Discovery Analytics Center. The center has more than 20 faculty members and 120 graduate students, two of whom are working directly with Jia to conduct the planned research.

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For chatbots and beyond: Improving lives with data starts with ... - Virginia Tech Daily