MUMBAI - Albert Einstein joined the Swiss Patent Office in 1902. In his seven years there, he wrote his four miracle papers and crafted theories that would change the world. Imagine if Einstein had had a personal artificial intelligence (PAI) assistant in that first year, something like Jarvis from the Iron Man films. During his life, this PAI would have been his assistant and collaborator, and after his death it would have become his legacy and helped to continue his work. Just as artificial intelligence (AI) imitates writing or painting styles, PAI might one day mimic the life of a person it has lived with for long enough.

Today, building this kind of cradle-to-grave PAI assistant is inching closer to reality. ChatGPT potentially marks the start of this, as does Google’s PaLM, LaMDA and Genesis. These are the first few pieces of the PAI assistant puzzle, and ChatGPT in particular has ensured that everyone takes notice. In the next few years, a new industry - the PAI industry - will likely be born. Still, questions remain: What would a PAI look like, and more importantly, what exactly would it do and how would it work for people?

What is ChatGPT?

When I asked ChatGPT to describe everything it can do in 100 words, it failed. It took me half a dozen other attempts to finally get it to encompass everything it can do. The response below is a little over 100 words, but ChatGPT was striving for meaning with this response, not mathematical accuracy:

“I am a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI. I was trained on a diverse range of internet text to understand and respond to a wide range of natural language input. I can answer questions, generate text, summarize information, and perform other language-related tasks such as language translation, text completion, text classification, and sentiment analysis. I can also generate code in various