Forget about a Siliccon Valley bank collapse, Artificial Intelligence will change the way we live.

OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, has fueled much of the frenzy with its ChatGPT tool, which went viral in recent months and demonstrated the power — and potential pitfalls — of chatbot technology. The startup just unveiled GPT-4, the latest iteration of the underlying software, earlier this week.

In December 2015, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Olivier Grabias, Amazon Web Services, Infosys and YC Research announced the formation of OpenAI and pledged over $1 billion to the venture. The organization stated it would “freely collaborate” with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and research open to the public.

The talent grab started and and Brockman drew up a list of the best researches in the field. The best researches ranked with the best NFL players. In 2020, OpenAI announced GPT 3 a language model trained on large internet datasets. GPT-3 is aimed at natural language answering of questions, but it can also translate between languages and coherently generate improvised text. As of January 2023, OpenAI was in talks for funding that would value the company at $29 billion, double the value of the company in 2021. On January 23, 2023, Microsoft announced a new multi-year, multi-billion dollar (reported to be $10 billion) investment in Open AI.

Why does GPT4 have the cybersecurity world worried?

On February 7, 2023, Microsoft announced that it is building AI technology based on the same foundation as Chat GPT into Microsoft Bing and Office 365 and other products.

On March 14, 2023, OpenAI released  GPT 4 both as an API (with a waitlist) and as a feature of ChatGPT Plus.
 As the latest and most advanced version of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) system developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is capable of text answering, content generation, language translation, and text summarisation, but at a much faster rate than previous versions.

Two threats that are of particular concern are:

  • ChatGPT may enable a more sophisticated phishing approach by malicious actors.
  • While ChatGPT’s parameters include security protocols to identify inappropriate requests, such as requests for instructions on how to build a bomb or write malicious code, developers have already succeeded in bypassing these protocols

What is Phising?

Phising accounts for around 90% of malware attack.1

Historically, there has been a distinction between generic phishing and spear phishing. Generic phishing takes a ‘shotgun’ approach, and works at a massive scale, sometimes sending out millions of lures in the form of emails, text messages, and social media postings. However, these lures take a ‘one size fits all’ approach, making them generic and easy to spot. The result is a very low success rate for the phisher.

In contrast, spear phishing uses social engineering to create highly targeted and customised lures. The result is a much higher yield – but because of the manual work involved in personalising the lure, spear phishing operates at a low scale.

The worry is that with ChatGPT generating lures, attackers can have the best of both worlds – the volume of generic phishing with the customisation and higher yield of spear phishing. ChatGPT can be used to generate unlimited unique variants of the same lure message and even automate it so that each phishing email is unique.

What are the investment opportunities

According to Bloomberg, Microsoft Corp.’s effort to overhaul its entire lineup with OpenAI technology has spread to one of the company’s oldest and best-known products: its Office apps.

The software, including Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Word, will begin using OpenAI’s new GPT-4 artificial intelligence platform, Microsoft said on Thursday. AI-powered assistants called Copilots will be able to generate whole documents, emails and slide decks from knowledge the software has gained scanning corporate files and listening to conference calls. The technology will debut in the coming months, and Microsoft is already testing it with 20 companies, including eight in the Fortune 500 that it declined to name.

Investors can gain exposure to the cybersecurity industry via the Betashares Global Cybersecurity ETF (ASX: HACK) which invests in a portfolio of the leading companies in the global cybersecurity sector.

 

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