Feeling the Peer Pressure to write on ChatGPT

So everyone I know has done a post on ChatGPT. And its a lot of peer pressure not to comment on it. I first read about it during the December break while waiting for the perennially late Bosco Boys to turn up for a school Alumni Brunch.

And I played around with it for some time before the world discovered it, wrote the doomsday predictions and made it up to capacity. And now everyone is cribbing about the 42$. I love that it's 42. It's probably a coincidence but there couldn't have been a better number. IYKIK!

But chatgpt took me down memory lane, back to Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. Around 2002, Shailesh Tavate Avishek Saha Aurovind Ravindrapandian Aashutosh Magdum, me, and a few others used to sit up into the night and chat with ELIZA and A.L.I.C.E. So honestly, ChatGPT is the latest in a long list of AI powered chat engines. And the rationale behind the hype is the accessibility beyond the engineering college nerds!

So my first analysis was to understand what had become better. First the conversation is now much more entertaining and engaging! No wonder it does pass the Turing test. But this also shows the power of opening up technology. Google's LaMDA was not launched for the public. OpenAI launched ChatGPT and made it accessible. Microsoft, well played! and if the rumours of Bing integrating ChatGPT into its answers are true, it can really shakeup the search market.

Second, it's not sentient! Whatever you might have read about it. Remember, it works on a database, the size of which is beyond human imagination. And therefore it can answer the basic questions and is an absolute fantastic source of free information just like Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (even with all its perils). In fact, I would go on to say, in some use cases that I typed, its answers were better (though less referenced) than Wiki.

Third, I heard Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway talking about it quite a lot. And I think they did cut out the hyperbole around it. I would agree. ChatGPT is a great tool for taking the mundane work out of the day. I am sure it will write great content as the years go by. And probably it will write great weather forecasts and great answers to questions asked by students for their term papers.

When it comes to marketing, the ability to access ideas sieved through probably the world's largest data set, generating content at will and writing "How Tos" will see a tectonic shift.

Like any technology, its use can only be limited by the the creativity of the user and the boundaries of technology! But 2023 is not "yet" the year we will reach Singularity.