ChatGPT - Whats does this technology mean for you?

The hype

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ChatGPT is the latest AI (Artificial Intelligence) tool to take the world by storm, with millions of people experimenting with its capabilities.?ChatGPT was launched in November 2022 and immediately went viral: It reached 1 million users after only five days.?It has been the subject of massive media coverage, being widely discussed on TV news programs, podcasts, the business and technology press, and of course, social media has been abuzz with often extreme views about the possibilities and the dangers.

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What is ChatGPT?

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So, what is ChatGPT and why all the fuss???ChatGPT is a large language model developed by Open AI that has been trained on a huge amount of text data.?It has the ability to generate text (write comprehensive answers to questions/create documents) as if the answers/documents were created by a human.

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You could think of ChatGPT as simply a very clever chatbot, but that description doesn’t really do it justice.?ChatGPT generates output where you conclude that the “chatbot” has understood the question, and the context and is a world expert in the content.?This often gives you the impression, for one of the first times in history, that the machine is human.?Unlike most chatbots, ChatGPT can also answer follow-on questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests (yes, I’ve tested that).??It can also imitate different speaking/writing styles at your request (for example, rewrite that please in the style of Shakespeare or Donald Trump).?It also has the ability to write computer code for you.

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Who made it?

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ChatGPT, also known as GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) is the brainchild (pun intended) of OpenAI, a privately held company based in San Francisco founded in December 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman.

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The company currently has around 400 employees and last year's revenue was less than US$ 50 million, however, this year OpenAI expects revenue to exceed $200 Million and to be around $1 Billion by 2024.?

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Microsoft’s interest

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In 2019 Microsoft invested $1 Billion in OpenAI. According to many news reports Microsoft is planning to invest a further $10 billion in exchange for a 49% shareholding.

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Microsoft's interest in Open AI is neither new nor surprising.?OpenAI has created many products, not just ChatGPT.

In 2021 Microsoft integrated ChatGPT into its low-code development platform -PowerApps.?In 2022 Microsoft launched a service for Azure Cognitive Services in association with OpenAI.?In the future, Microsoft could use ChatGPT to enhance the Bing search engine, Dynamics, and also incorporate it into Office applications like Word and Outlook.

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Likely use cases

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Who stands to gain or lose from the arrival of ChatGPT??There are an enormous number of potential beneficiaries because ChatGPT can be integrated into a wide range of applications.?At its core, however, ChatGPT is about automation and providing more engaging (human-like) interactions with users. The most likely use cases are therefore:

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·???????Customer service

·???????Content creation

·???????Process automation

·???????Assisting with language learning

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Perhaps the most obvious use case is for organisations to utilise ChatGPT to make their own chatbots smarter and more engaging.?Increasingly customers care less about whether they are assisted by a human or a chatbot, what matters is the speed, quality, and convenience of the assistance.????

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Content creation is a very wide topic encompassing essays, blogs, manuals, training guides, proposals, and so much more.?

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Process automation is possibly the key to maximising the value of ChatGPT, by seamlessly integrating ChatGPT’s functionality with existing systems and processes.

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Given ChatGPT’s powerful abilities to construct documents with optimised content, sentence structure, and grammar it is likely that the technology could be used to assist with language learning, including tutoring, testing, and correcting.

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Practical considerations for your business

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It is tempting to get caught up in the hype associated with ChatGPT given some of the amazing capabilities it has but there has also been quite a lot of social media highlighting a range of amusing failures, everything from poor math ability to producing incorrect instructions, to lack of a moral compass.

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Whilst ChatGPT represents a significant step up from earlier technology it’s still prone to producing convincing nonsense.?One of the significant challenges is that you can only tell that ChatGPT is wrong when you already know the answer.?There is a risk that ChatGPT will produce insensitive, biased, and possibly even incorrect information.?Given those risks, we are still a long way off from the mass loss of human jobs or seeing the demise of school essays and creative writing.

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ChatGPT like any other technology comes with limitations.?Those limitations need to be factored into any deployment including how this emerging technology will integrate into your existing ecosystem of products and services.??ChatGPT is in most ways similar to any other emerging technology and so should be treated in much the same way:?Business case, assessment of pros and cons, risk mitigation plan, the path forward, etc.

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Ethics and safety are always a consideration but in the case of ChatGPT should probably be treated with higher priority. ChatGPT unleashed might have some unwanted effects that could run away on you in subtle and therefore difficult ways to spot until it's too late.?Comprehensive testing and monitoring are highly advised.?

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Compliance with regulatory requirements is becoming a hot topic.?Regulations relating to AI are currently limited, but this is an area of increasing focus made more difficult because of the complexity.?Regulators will need to consider a wide range of factors including legal, ethical, and privacy, as well as “usual” regulations like intellectual property and consumer protection.?

Because the technology produces human-like answers without being human, there is a potential risk of misinformation.?

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As with all AI systems, the data used is critically important. ChatGPT is just a tool, the extent to which it is able to benefit organisations will likely come down to the data that it utilises.?Simply plugging the generic ChatGPT capability into your business process is unlikely to achieve very much, anyone could do that, but it would quickly lose its novelty, become mundane, or worse.?The real opportunity is to integrate and fine-tune ChatGPT to your particular use case, your context, and your data.???Doing this well is potentially game-changing to the extent that you could set yourself apart by delivering simply outstanding customer personalisation at a digital scale.

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What might the future bring?

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There is already a great deal of speculation about what the next version of ChatGPT will be capable of (based on the release of GPT-4).?Whilst OpenAI is very tight-lipped on future releases it is reasonable to assume that there will be improvements in most areas creating the appearance that ChatGPT is even more human.?

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GPT-3 contains 175 billion machine learning parameters and there have been unsubstantiated rumors that GPT-4 might have as many as 100 trillion learning parameters.?Regardless of how the learning model size increases, it is very likely that the next version of ChatGPT will have benefits such as a better understanding of context/user intentions and higher quality output with lower errors.

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Actions to take

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ChatGPT may not be for everyone, but then again it just might be.?As a business professional, albeit owner, manager, or staff role, I believe you have a responsibility to assess and make decisions about technologies or tools that have the potential to transform your organisation or your job for the better.

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Today, those most interested in the potential of ChatGPT are likely to be content creators, customer management/support owners, marketing professionals, and software developers, but in time it is likely that ChatGPT will interest and impact a much wider audience.

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So maybe now is a good time to start thinking about how ChatGPT could help or hinder your current operations.??You can experiment with it for yourself at https://chat.openai.com/chat ?although global demand is so high the site is often overloaded.