ChatGPT for your business?
As a software development company, we are always excited when new technical capabilities such as ChatGPT arise. In this article, we will take a closer look at ChatGPT to gauge whether it is ready for production use, and answer some of the questions we often get when talking to businesses about their digital transformation and strategy:
What is this ChatGPT everybody is talking about?
It is a chat bot powered by a large language model, published by the American corporation OpenAI.
What is,?actually, ChatGPT?
It is a very, very sophisticated text predictor. Given a text prompt, it can guess what a "correct" and "proper" answer to a given question looks like, based on a statistical analysis of the gigantic amount of text it has processed and analyzed during its training.
Is it an AI?
The question is complicated and does not have a simple answer.
What is important to understand is that, as a text predictor, it is much unlike any other computer program we are used to. Instead of being accurate but rigid, it is extremely flexible but occasionally imprecise. It is particularly strong at text?manipulation?- rewriting established information in a specific format or style - but it does not perform logic or reasoning as we might expect of either a human or a classic program.
For example, it can predict that "What is 2 + 2?" should be followed by an answer containing "4", because it has seen that question a lot of times in a lot of forms. However, ask it "618618618 / 98759" and it will give an approximate answer that is off by 10 or more.
This is because it is only able to guess the right answer by looking at similar math questions and answers. Even so, its understanding of 'analogies' and 'patterns' is profound enough that it can come close to the right answer by simple textual analysis. Which is absurdly impressive.
Can my customers use it?
Customer support chatbots have been used for a long time, and ChatGPT promises to constitute a major upgrade to the existing tools.
ChatGPT is particularly good at absorbing large amounts of reference texts and present the information contained therein, which makes it a very good complement to a traditional knowledge base. In addition to acting as a search engine, it will often be able to provide examples, or highlight important parts of a complex concept.
Several major online services, from Snapchat to Shopify, have gained early access to ChatGPT's API and used it to provide AI assistants to their customers.
However, once again, its reasoning abilities are limited, even for the type of straightforward questions a customer might ask.
For example, one could ask ChatGPT if a specific model of dishwasher could fit in the trunk of a specific car model. ChatGPT can easily provide the exact measurements involved, however it might also answer that the dishwasher is too tall to fit in the car trunk - without understanding that the dishwasher could have been laid down on its back or side. A customer would probably be left quite confused by this answer.
Still, there is a large number of common customer questions - from 'what are your opening hours' to 'what screw size do I need for this table' - that ChatGPT could handle without much trouble.
Can my support team use it?
This is a possible approach. ChatGPT can provide your support team with a better interface to navigate large knowledge bases, while avoiding the risk that your customers may receive incorrect answers from the bot.
(Note that the 'large knowledge base' doesn't necessarily have to be your own. ChatGPT has a very good knowledge of mainstream operating systems, and it can not only answer fairly obscure questions but also generate useful Powershell or Bash scripts that match the task you describe.)
Of course, that does mean that you're giving up on the biggest cost saving argument for ChatGPT, which is to reduce the need for Level 1 support personnel to handle trivial questions.
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So a starting point for consideration might be: large number of relatively simple customer support issues? Offer them a ChatGPT support assistant, with the option to escalate to human support. Fewer issues, but generally more complex or obscure? Use ChatGPT as a productivity booster for your support.
Can my software developers use it?
While writing code is only a part of a developer's job, code is ultimately highly structured text, and as such ChatGPT is very good at producing it. As with human languages, its performance will scale with the popularity of the programming language for which it is asked to produce text.
Microsoft is currently the largest investor in OpenAI and has already licensed the use of the same technology underlying ChatGPT for its?Github Copilot?product - a $19/user/month service that integrates with the four most common code editors in use (Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IntelliJ and derivatives, and NeoVim). If your developers use one of these editors, a Copilot subscription will typically be a strong boost to their productivity. As a rule of thumb, workloads that involve writing large quantities of fairly standardized code will save the most time with Copilot's support, while developers who need to solve original problems will benefit much less.
Manually using ChatGPT itselfs as a supporting programmer is also possible, and has the potential to be even more flexible than Copilot. If you are a developer yourself, the next article in this series will explore some ways to get ChatGPT to write useful code for you - stay tuned.
Can it integrate inside my apps?
Yes! That's what the aforementioned Snapchat and Shopify do. As of March 1st,?ChatGPT is available in API form, and one of the APIs even includes a speech-to-text engine.
It's worth noting that the APIs appear to be very simple to integrate. However, it makes use of a private API key for your account, so your apps will need to route any requests through your own servers in order to keep said API key secure.
Can it speak other languages?
Yes. We don't know exactly how many or how well, but ChatGPT is able to hold fluent conversations in many languages, including Danish. However, the size of the "training" texts for other languages was almost certainly smaller than that of the English texts, so it may not perform quite as well, and it can occasionally make grammatical mistakes.
How much does it cost?
For commercial use, as of this article's writing, the API price is 2 USD per million tokens. This is about a tenth of what previous "AI"-powered services used to cost.
A "token" is a word, number, or punctuation mark in a question; so "What is the capital of South Africa?" uses eight tokens.
Note that a lot of productive uses of ChatGPT may require very long questions: for example, it could be asked to summarize a given text, or to change its style, or to clean up a piece of code.
What if there is an outage?
ChatGPT is at the very start of its commercial life, and there has already been outages, although none have been very long. OpenAI does not currently offer a SLA of any kind, although it plans to do so in the future.
As such, you should not make ChatGPT the?only?way to interface with your products. However, outages are far from the only reason to take this precaution: as we've repeated, ChatGPT can occasionally provide wrong or misleading answers, and should not be considered 100% reliable even if the service is working correctly.
What about my data, or my customers'?
According to OpenAPI's privacy policy, all conversations held through ChatGPT's public web page will be harvested and used for training and research, but this will not apply to requests sent through its paid API, which will be kept private. OpenAI also provides?a request form?to refuse to have your data included in said training sets.
For legal purposes, OpenAI also provides a?data processing agreement?which?should?enable companies operating in Europe to make use of ChatGPT's services while respecting the GDPR. However, there are?open questions?regarding OpenAI's GDPR compliance, for example whether it is capable of respecting Article 17 (right to request deletion of personal data), or whether the training texts were lawfully acquired in the first place. Please take that into account if considering making ChatGPT a critical part of your business.
Getting started
If you would like to leverage ChatGPT in your business then reach out to us and let us help.