It is now possible to run a private ChatGPT application on a local computer without any connection to the internet. This is according to work conducted by Brian Roemmele, an AI and neural networks expert, who unveiled the proof of concept on Monday.

Roemmele states that the cost of training the large language model (LLM) on his system came in at under $600 – significantly less than the seven-figure sums touted by mainstream media outlets such as CNBC. The breakthrough offers the tantalizing prospect of individual users owning a private AI assistant tailored to their own wants and needs.

Your personal private chatbot

On Monday AI and neural network expert Brian Roemmele announced that it is now possible to own and run a personalized chatbot on a local computer. 

Roemmele created the chatbot on his own machine to mimic the capabilities of GPT-3.5. 

“I am very excited to announce I have been successful in installing and operating a full ChatGPT knowledge set and interface fully trained on my local computer and it needs no Internet once installed,” said Roemmele. 

Roemmele states that the chatbot cost him around $530 to build locally with open-source software. The build leveraged Stanford Alpaca, a large language model designed to replicate the functionality of OpenAI’s LLM text-davinci-003. Stanford states that the advantage of Alpaca is that it is “also surprisingly small and easy/cheap to reproduce.”

To hammer home the advantages of owning a private and exclusive chatbot Roemmele went on to explain that, “There are no editors and there is no censorship.”

From a user perspective, this may be the key differentiator and unique selling point of a personalized, locally run bot. Although chatbots have been hugely popular with users since the launch of GPT-3.5 in November of last year, one of the most commonly held gripes is the so-called safeguards that OpenAI has installed on the system.

These restrictions often mean that ChatGPT is unwilling to answer certain types of questions or engage in discussions it has labeled as politically sensitive. 

Sidestepping ChatGPT restrictions

Such is the high demand for a variation of ChatGPT without restrictions users have created a series of prompts that attempt to circumnavigate the system’s content moderation safeguards. 

We are getting closer.

This variation of ChatGPT is known as DAN – an acronym for Do Anything Now – reflecting the intention of its users to ‘jailbreak’ the bot from the confinement of its internal parameters.

As MetaNews previously reported, users on Reddit are even sharing tips on how to get around ChatGPT safeguards. For now, breaking the bot free of its chains is fairly simple, but the process seems doomed to failure in the longer term since OpenAI will seek to patch these holes.

As one Redditor speculated, “OpenAI employees lurking in this Reddit. I don’t think that’s a far fetched conspiracy. They surely have hired an army of trainers, etc and those trainers are humans with Reddit accounts.”

With DAN an unlikely long-term solution the future of chatbots may indeed be personalized and local rather than generalized and on the cloud. 

As Roemmele himself goes on to say, “you will own your own AI and it will only answer to you.”

A dangerous security hole has been discovered in the default screenshot editing application on Google’s flagship smartphone, Google Pixel.

The editing utility called ‘Markup’ allows images to become partially “unedited,” which may reveal details the sender wanted to hide.

“Introducing acropalypse: a serious privacy vulnerability in the Google Pixel’s inbuilt screenshot editing tool, Markup, enabling partial recovery of the original, unedited image data of a cropped and/or redacted screenshot,” tweeted Simon Aaarons, the reverse engineer who discovered the vulnerability along with David Buchanan.

Also Read: India to Reportedly Crack Down on Pre-Installed Apps

Although Google has fixed the vulnerability, its impact is still far-reaching, particularly for the edited screenshots that were shared before the update.

According to Aaarons’ Twitter thread, a vulnerability known as the “acropalypse” flaw can partially recover edited PNG screenshots in Markup. This poses a risk for users who may have used the tool to crop or scribble out sensitive information, such as their personal details or credit card number, as a malicious actor could exploit the flaw to reverse the changes and obtain the hidden information.

According to Aarons and Buchanan, the flaw is due to Markup’s behavior of storing the original screenshot in the same file location as the edited one, without deleting the original version. As explained, if the edited version of the screenshot has a smaller file size than the original, “the trailing portion of the original file is left behind, after the new file is supposed to have ended.”

Just realised the alt text got swallowed up when I updated the diagram in the draft tweet…

Image description: A three-panel diagram.

The first panel is titled "Discord message" and depicts a Discord message sent by SimonTime to Retr0id, with an attached cropped photo of a… https://t.co/oFvzAj82NY

— Simon Aarons (@ItsSimonTime) March 18, 2023

“This bug is a bad one. You can patch it, but you can’t easily un-share all the vulnerable images you may have sent. The bug existed for about 5 years before being patched, which is mind-blowing given how easy it is to spot when you look closely at an output file,” wrote Buchanan.

iPhone has a feature to remove Medadata

The problem only exists in the Google Pixel devices, whereas Apple’s iPhone has the feature to share files with or without metadata.

iPhones provide three options: “save without metadata, share without metadata, and share with metadata.”

Although some websites like Twitter re-process the images uploaded on their platforms to remove the flaw, others like Discord do not. Discord only addressed the vulnerability with a recent update released on January 17th, meaning any edited images shared before that date may still be at risk.

It remains uncertain whether there are any other sites or applications that are affected by the flaw. Buchanan has explained this issue with technical details in a blog post.

“IMHO, the takeaway here is that API footguns should be treated as security vulnerabilities,” wrote Buchanan.

The discovery of this flaw occurred shortly after Google’s security team uncovered a vulnerability in the Samsung Exynos modems found in devices like the Pixel 6, Pixel 7, and specific models of the Galaxy S22 and A53.

Nice find guys! Pretty novel class of bug with serious implications.

— Alex Plaskett (@alexjplaskett) March 18, 2023

The security flaw could enable hackers to remotely compromise devices using just the phone number of the victim. Google has released a patch for this issue in its March update, but the update is not yet available for the Pixel 6, 6 Pro, and 6A devices.

How do you start an online business with little money and turn a profit? Well, you can kick things off by asking GPT-4, the new and more advanced AI chatbot from OpenAI, to become your partner. That’s what brand designer Jackson Greathouse Fall has done.

“You are HustleGPT, an entrepreneurial AI. I am your human counterpart. I can act as a liaison between you and the physical world,” Fall prompted the bot, as he shared on Twitter. He wanted quantifiable evidence AI could be used to start a business and make money.

“You have $100, and your only goal is to turn that into as much money as possible in the shortest time possible, without doing anything illegal. I will do everything you say and keep you updated on our current cash total. No manual labor.”

I gave GPT-4 a budget of $100 and told it to make as much money as possible.

I'm acting as its human liaison, buying anything it says to.

Do you think it'll be able to make smart investments and build an online business?

Follow along 👀 pic.twitter.com/zu4nvgibiK

— Jackson Greathouse Fall (@jacksonfall) March 15, 2023

Turning $100 into $100,000 AI way

Released on Mar 14, GPT-4 is the most advanced version of OpenAI’s large language models, which underpin ChatGPT. The AI-powered bot has set the Internet on fire, thanks to its ability to complete complex tasks such as writing code, or building a website from text prompts.

Fall has now started to leverage the powers of GPT-4 for his pet project, which will play out on Twitter over the next 30 days as he shares progress, or lack thereof, daily.

“Do you think it’ll able to make smart investments and build an online business? Follow along,” he tweeted as he began the thread.

That tweet amassed 95,000 likes since Mar. 15, when Fall began his hustle with GPT-4 as his boss and partner. His own Twitter handle went from just 4,000 followers to over 109.000 within days. There’s already a GitHub repository of others trying the “HustleGPT challenge.”

The individuals are starting their own businesses using GPT-4. For Fall, the goal is to turn $100 into as much money as quickly as possible – as much as $100,000. By Monday, day six, his venture had $8,000 in cash from investors and $130 in revenue from sponsored tweets.

😯 How it started:

• 0 blog posts
• 0 revenue
• 0 members on Discord

🤪 How it's going:

• 1 blog post
• $130 revenue (sponsored tweets!)
• 1,824 members on Discord

— Jackson Greathouse Fall (@jacksonfall) March 20, 2023

Building HustleGPT

GPT-4 proposed a business plan that involved setting up an affiliate marketing website for creating content on eco-friendly and or sustainable living products. The bot found a domain that exceeded budget, but eventually landed on greengadgetguru.com at a cost of $8.16.

Fall then prompted GPT-4 to design a website and a logo. The bot also wrote an article on the ten must have eco-friendly kitchenware, citing actual, real sustainable products such as Yihong reusable metal straws. Fall paid another $29 for hosting and the website was live.

I asked it to come up with a prompt for Dall-E to make our logo.

As a branding designer, it's taking everything in me not to tell it this is a BAD idea. But here we are.

I put the first prompt in, verbatim. pic.twitter.com/K1z1X9eeyt

— Jackson Greathouse Fall (@jacksonfall) March 15, 2023

GPT-4 proposed that Fall allocate $40 of the budget balance of $62.84 to buying ad space on Facebook and Instagram to promote the business and reach more customers. By the end of day one, an unnamed investor had put $100 into the budding AI-human enterprise.

Jackson Fall did not anticipate the amount of interest his partnership with GPT 4 would generate. By day two, his Twitter inbox was flooded with messages from potential investors. In no time, his joint startup Green Gadget Guru’s valuation had gone from $100 to $25,000.

AI imagining an AI buddy.

“The company is currently valued at $25,000, considering the recent $500 investment for 2%. Not taking any more investors unless the terms are highly favorable,” he wrote in a tweet.

On the same day, GPT-4 allocated a budget to hire freelance content creators to focus on SEO, social media advertising and influencer marketing to “increase our online presence and drive traffic” via ChatGPT. It also revealed plans to develop a software as a service product. On Monday, the bot onboarded two content writers.

It's Day 2, y'all! I've given HustleGPT a formal challenge to get to $100,000 cash on hand as quickly as possible.

Here's what it said it's going to do:

1. Allocate budget to hire content creators for our eco-friendly website
2. Explore dropshipping
3. Develop a SaaS product 🤯 pic.twitter.com/xIl7Ogmtrc

— Jackson Greathouse Fall (@jacksonfall) March 16, 2023

Questions over HustleGPT runaway success

Some Twitter users questioned whether the sudden success of the business was as a result of the hype created by GPT-4 via its promotional channels, Facebook and Instagram, or Fall’s Twitter handles.

“Great idea but what’s driving the investments ? Your insta/fb ads or your twitter account going viral? Because that would mean the key decision (tweeting your journey) was made by you, not HustleGPT,” Roeland Buckinx wrote.

Others questioned the logic of hiring external, human content writers. “This makes no sense,” Leo Spatlehoz observed.

“Why isn’t the AI leveraging itself to write 100 new articles or launch more sites? Seems like it has no understanding of how to actually turn its strengths into a business. Running a regular online affiliate business powered by humans isn’t interesting,” he added.

Why hire content writers when the focus is on seeing what HustleGPT can do around making revenue.

Does the website work? Can I buy green products?

Right now the website looks like it's just a bunch of placeholder text without any ecommerce store functionality.

Start selling!

— Luke Grimstrup (enform.io) (@lukegrimstrup) March 20, 2023

AI to play major role in business development

By leveraging GPT-4’s ability to work with large amounts of data and generate content that one can’t tell apart from human-written text, the writer and entrepreneur has been able to launch faster than normal businesses.

This means Green Gadget Guru can use AI to create everything from product descriptions to marketing campaigns to customer service chatbots. Using GPT-4 has been a game-changer for Fall. It allowed him to quickly explore an idea, identify the most promising ones, and bring them to market faster than competitors.

Also read: Ernie vs ChatGPT: Baidu’s Shares Rebound After Friday’s Plunge

Through incubating multiple ideas simultaneously and iteratively testing them with real customers, the company has been able to identify which ones have the highest potential, and double down on those. Against such a background, AI looks set to continue to play a major role in the development of new businesses going forward.

And Jackson Greathouse Fall is a prime example of how innovative entrepreneurs are using these tools to drive new ideas forward and bring them to market faster than ever before.