ChatGPT or AI in your work environment?

ChatGPT, an A.I. system developed by OpenAI, is available to the public since the end of 2022. It has been making big waves since. From making students book reports, writing their papers to new lyrics of old songs.

So what is it?

It is a system trained on vast amounts of online text. And is capable of predicting the probable next word in a sentence. This results in writing that is strikingly humanlike.

It’s amazing, Mike!

Despite the amazement and excitement surrounding ChatGPT, I believe it's important to express a certain level of skepticism. These systems will not only reduce the cost of producing text, images, and code, but video and audio as well. With their ability to sound and appear human, these outputs will appear and sound extremely convincing. Their primary focus is on mimicry. Mastering the art of persuasion, creating outputs that seem remarkably realistic and from a human. My ex-colleague Sander Duivenstein co-wrote a great book about it (Echt Nep).

But ChatGPT has no actual idea what it’s saying or doing. You are just looking, basically, at an autocomplete. A very advanced and costly autocomplete.

I was surprised by my sort of wonder when I started using ChatGPT because it is a very, very cool program. And in many ways, I find that its answers are much better than Google for a lot of what I would ask it. My wife and I were looking to paint a staircase and it came with some very helpful information, in Dutch!

But at the heart of it, it is just repeating stuff that other people have said. And trying to maximize the probability of that. It’s just autocomplete. A very probable echo chamber. And as we all experienced in some way or another, autocomplete just gives you bullshit. There used to be a website that made fun of the errors of autocomplete and autocorrect (damnyouautocorrect.com), but it seems it went the way of the dodo.

Is ChatGPT a great next step in AI?

That is a very big topic where a lot of much smarter people wrote great articles and papers about. Tom me it is a great tool that highlights the strength of Large Language models. Cyberdyne systems taking over our world? Not by a long shot.

AI in your Enterprise?

So having taking the position of a ChatGPT sceptic, is there a place for AI in your enterprise? I think there is. But it needs to exist in the contextual fabric of where your customers lives. With the products that Salesforce has within our platform we give you the tools to get insights from your customers based on their past interactions.

Customer facing

You can then use these insights to strengthen relationships, prioritize leads, score opportunities, determine who needs to solve a cases, and help with campaigns to drive your business forward.

Employee productivity

With Einstein you can help your employees get more done in a shorter amount of time with intelligent case classification, next best actions, and recommendations. Provide them with the answers and information they need quickly while automating the best action to take.

See our Salesforce blog for some actionable information https://admin.salesforce.com/blog/2020/build-intelligent-apps-with-the-salesforce-platform