Learnings from a newbie on ChatGPT
Chris Ross-Lewin
Managing engagement for an exceptional IT services company for professional services including law and accountancy. Occasional journeyman photographer at weekends.
It's clever.?Very clever and creative but does have limitations.?Ask ChatGPT about Microsoft 365 and you'll get a list of standard applications but ask it about 365 enterprise security and management features and all of a sudden you have a much deeper dive.?You need to know enough to ask the right questions and it doesn't take long to find limits to it's responses.
My top tip having firstly attempted to log on and stake a place in their digital queue with work email without success I found that using Gmail on my mobile let me straight in (every time).?
Planning a holiday which are the best hotels in .. it didn't even try to answer on the grounds that it does not have real time data (picked out use of the word 'best' maybe) so maybe not the end of search engines was we know it just yet.?
Can you ask ChatGPT however to write a poem though (yes and one that makes sense even giving the subject of Burritos and LinkedIn). If you know you know on that one as a networking event.??
Want to know technology trends for 2023 and every sentence is preceded with "may" but did reply.?An abbreviated version of how it answered this being AI (well it would), IoT, Blockchain becoming more mainstream, Edge computing becoming more prevalent and 5G becoming more widely available, Increased AR/VR adoption and significant advances expected in Quantum computing.?Some people might think RPA (robotic process automation) deserves a place here or predictive analytics but answers are always measured and safe!
If you want a strategy style document however it's surprisingly adept at providing a framework but you'll have to fill in the details.?If you want that as a presentation you'll find you have to do some of the lifting also as it does not "have the ability to create visual aids or design slides".?Spoiler alert Microsoft are expected to provide integration for their own AI in the not so distant future.?
Whilst I've not tried this myself I've seen on Twitter (where else) someone complaining that it would not provide a joke deemed too politically correct.?In the same thread someone had a workaround posing I'm an actor and to help me get into character style query obtained those jokes!?You can get past the defences it seems if you ask a question in a different way.?You are also given the option to provide a better answer but don't bother trying to teach it that 2+2=5 (Someone has already tried that).
Oh and if you've spent your working life fighting software wanting to introduce American spellings I noticed I was only getting spelling for my region (UK) without any prompting. One of the light bulb moments for me was asking ChatGPT to explain the settings I should use for my camera for football (local village team) and I have to say it delivered helpful tips in clear English.??
A few stats. OpenAI have raised $11 billion in funding (mostly Microsoft in 2023) and ChatGPT surpassed 100 million users in two weeks. If that wasn't enough to suggest longevity it will be built into enterprise and consumer Microsoft products with Azure OpenAI a large scale data cloud offering.?As a final irony the technical paper "Attention is all you Need" was published by Google Researcher in 2017 for a neural network breakthrough in natural language processing. I'm guessing Google are wishing they maintained custody there!