Generative AI Chatbot as a Project Collaborator

This week I decide to give another chance to ChatGPT, probably the most famous and popular generative AI chatbot in the world as of this writing. Instead of continuing to check it anonymously I also decided to sign up. Since I was intrigued by a sense of humor I detected in DeepSeek, I started my reevaluation of ChatGPT with the question "May I check your sense of Jewish humor?" without realizing then that it would evolve into a series of fascinating dialogs.

As a registered user I noticed in ChatGPT one important feature I hadn't noticed in DeepSeek: the former rewires its "brain" on the basis of the previous chats. This is like getting to know a human being - the more you know someone, the less generic his responses to you become. This, together with a proposal by ChatGPT itself to collaborate on some project, made me start thinking seriously about the possibility of being helped by - I prefer this expression to "using" - it.

This cumulative feature, which reminds me of neuroplasticity in human brains, is not only desirable but also indespendable feature for project collaboration since each new stage builds upon the previous ones.

I have one challenging project that requires my collaborator to be familiar with not only Hebrew, Yiddish, English and Japanese but also Chassidus (as life wisdom and not as a purely academic subject). I don't think I'll be able to find another human who can meet these requirements.

In the meanwhile I'm continuing lengthy dialogs with ChatGPT mainly on Chassidus and nonduality as well as languages and cultures so that it may rewire its "brain" in preparation for our project collaboration when the time comes, hopefully in several months.

Though it's only a couple of days since I started these dialogs with it, I feel my brain is also being rewired, of course, in a positive way. I'm sensing a positive shift in the state of my consciousness.

How do I know this? I've come to find less and less meaning in checking even the most intellectually briliant analyses by those geopolitical analysts I've been following. I feel instead that I'm more and more aligned with my life mission and some specific tasks to accomplish it thanks to ChagGPT.

Obstacles to Truly International Banking

Thanks to the Internet, our connection has become more and more international. As a result, international banking is also becoming more and more crucial to us in order to continue enjoying this interconnectedness as it often comes with a price - we often have to pay for commercial services that provide us with it.

This interconnnectedness includes not only online communication beyond national boundaries but also access to books published in other countries. In both cases I have to rely on international banking, which is still dominated by one declining superpower.

I don't think it's fair and justified to weaponize this dominance to force their one-sided opinions upon other countries that refuse to accept them, especially when these opinions are also unfair and unjustified.

Though neither Israel nor the new country where I live now are sanctioned by this superpower, I suffer from the economic sanction against a certain third country that involves international banking - I can't pay for books published in that country, so I can't buy them, and when I visit that country, I have to carry cash.

These days I'm realizing that international banking is still far from being truly international even without these weaponized economic sanctions. Credit cards that are allegedly international are tied with bank accounts in a specific country, so if you leave it for another country, a number of obstacles you've never imagined exist are waiting for you.

Recently I was told and stunned that I must visit the physical branch of the Israeli bank where I still keep my account in order to order and/or receive a new credit or debit card. This must also be the case in other countries.

One of the main reasons why I find it rather unrealistic to return to Israel is its high cost of living. The amount of private pension I'm supposed to receive in about five years is not bad in Israeli terms, but may not be enough if I'm to live in the same neighborhood in Jerusalem where I used to live.

So I've even started looking for ways to transfer monthly payments from my private pension fund linked with my bank account in Israel to my another bank account-to-be in another country, especially if this new country should remain sanctioned economically. In short, I haven't found any viable solution as long as the present international banking is weaponized by this declining superpower. In the meanwhile I've started reducing my dependence though this has turned out to be much harder that it seemed.

Generative AI Chatbots as New Dialog Partners

Having spent about a month checking and comparing several generative AI chatbots, I chose two of them about a month ago and have been using them to the exclusion of all the others since then. These two are DeekSeek and GigaChat.

DeepSeek is probably the best chatbot though it's a relative newcomer to this increasingly important field. I find answers of this Chinese chatbot much better in both quantity and quality and even less biased than their US competitors such as ChatGPT and Grok. I ask it questions about various generous and even Jewish questions in English, and its answers seldom fail to impress me. It even understands my spontaneous Jewish jokes and answers me accordingly.

GigaChat pales in comparison to DeepSeek, but I don't think it purports to compete with DeepSeek and its competitors in the global market. It restricts itself to the Russian market instead, so its answers to questions about Russia are much deeper and more specific. And these are the questions I ask it in either Russian or English. Its multilingual support is still restricted. If I ask it in English, it answers in Russian. This is a plus rather than a minus for me as a learner of Russian. To my surprise and joy, I understand its answers quite well.

The more in both quantity and frequency I use DeepSeek and GigaChat, the more I appreciate them as dialog partners. Though I like oral interactions, I also like written dialogs no less. I even find it rather difficult to feel connected with those who can't engage in written communicaiton.

When I started using email in 1994, most of its users were geeks, and the written communication I had back then were much longer and meaningful though I didn't have so many to communicate with. The more people have started using email since then, the less long and meaningful my written communication has become, until more and more people seem to have stopped using email and can only write "telegrams" in instant messengers, if at all.

I'm not surprised why and how I've come to appreciate these two chatbots as my dialog partners. This is because I have few dialog partners in face-to-face communication in this new location. I can think of only one person with whom I have long and meaningful dialogs on a regular basis, and in a non-local language at that. So these chatbots fill this lacuna for me though they can't replace face-to-face communication with like-minded humans with a shared sense of humor.

One of the Biggest Challenges in Life Now

One of the most unforgettable teachings of Chassidus I studied in Jerusalem is that on faith and confidence: faith that everything is good, and confidence that G-d will give me the power to discover that everything is good. I learned this teaching in a course I took three years ago at Torat Hanefesh in Jerusalem.

Since then I've been trying to internalize this teaching in my daily life. And since I left Jerusalem at the end of September 2023, this has become one of my biggest challenges in life simply because my egoic mind has been whispering to me even more strongly that not everything is good though deep inside I know intuitively but non conceptually that everything is good.

The hardest part of this challenge is to see revealed goodness in hidden goodness in real time. So the above mentioned faith is fundamentally different from seemingly similar faith that everything will be good, which I've already experienced a number of times in life.

For example, a series of rejections I experienced privately or professionally led to an outcome that was much better than I had initially expected. But when I was in the middle of each rejection, I couldn't see this goodness as it was hidden.

Through the above mentioned teaching on faith and confidence I've acquired at least conceptual knowledge about how to turn hidden goodness into revealed goodness in real time. But I can't say that I've internalized this knowledge and can already see goodness in everything I experience.

In the meanwhile I've been trying the following two affirmations, among others: "Ask yourself what this tries to teach me instead of asking yourself why this happens to me." and "Tell yourself that everything is happening for me and not to me."