ChatGPT's emergence, disruption and future.

ChatGPT is a new conversational AI chatbot from OpenAI that has been trending worldwide since it publication in November 2022. ChatGPT is the quickest platform to reach 1 million users with it's record breaking 5 days. Instagram took 2 months in 2010 to reach the same amount of users. Though it's data is only current up to 2021, you can use it for a wide amount of use cases with simple prompts and a little training. I have seen a slew of great posts on my LinkedIn stream that show what ChatGPT can (and can't) do. Examples are helping with coding, assistance in creative hooks and my personal favorite: writing whole papers.

One of OpenAI's other AI models, Dall-E (visuals based on a user query), already made headlines with winning a digital art contest, which is absolutely gorgeous. This calls into question whether it should be allowed to use such a model in contests or to replace one's own work. The usage of such a model has the potential to make everyone an artist. If you really understand how the platform works you can create beautiful imagery much quicker than doing it by hand. But here is the thing; you need to understand how the model works and differentiate between good and bad prompts. Trust me, you do not want to use some of the creepy human faces Dall-E can generate. Garbage in, garbage out.

ChatGPT, not new, just well engineered and publicized

As Meta's chief AI, Yann LeCun, has said: ChatGPT is nothing new to the world of AI, but it is well engineered. And even though all the big tech companies have created chatbots like ChatGPT in their AI labs, we won't see something similar publicized from Alphabet, Meta or Amazon anytime soon. The strength of the chatbot lies in circumventing the other tech giants biggest business model: selling ads besides their search results. But for Microsoft that might be a decent enough price to pay to ensure that Bing wins the battle against Google.

Sorry investors, Microsoft already owns ChatGPT and OpenAI won't go public anytime soon

Microsoft has already funded ChatGPT parent company OpenAI two times before and just announced it will invest another 10 billion dollars. The investment will be put to good use to scale OpenAI's servers since they are already overloaded by the massive amount of users looking to use ChatGPT. In return Microsoft owns the rights to use ChatGPT and you can expect Microsoft to apply the chatbots capabilities to enhance Azure, Bing, Word, Powerpoint and more. This will give Microsoft quite the edge in the AI and browser war which has already caused Alphabet to go into red alert.

Don't get me wrong. ChatGPT is by no means ready for the general public as the example on the right demonstrates. I have encountered limitations to know it is not perfect at this point in time. However, it is already capable enough of being applied in a wide array of use cases as long as the user check the responses thoroughly. Before long we will see how platforms like ChatGPT and Dall-E disrupts the economy. As with any innovation and transformation, laggards will not adapt and shun the platform. Early adopters on the other hand will augment their work by having an AI to automate or speed up some of their activities. If I was an employer I would know who to hire.