Say yes to ChatGPT!

ChatGPT is easily the tech application I am most excited about for 2023 and I plan to leverage for personal and professional purposes.

Released by OpenAI in November 2022, ChatGPT has been celebrated for making artificial intelligence mainstream. Touted capabilities include: simplifying complex topics, writing and debugging code, researching and generating content, editing copy, and summarizing long articles/books. I celebrate this new dimension of knowledge accessibility, especially as I reflect on barriers to knowledge from my childhood. My local library in the Bronx did not always have all the resources I needed to support my research papers, so I often had to go to a library in Manhattan to access microfilm and microfiche files. (I’m aging myself). Encyclopedia sets were expensive, but were considered the gold standard for in-home knowledge, and so my parents made the sacrifice.

Like all new technologies, ChatGPT has faced its fair share of criticism. Below are my reflections on a few of these criticisms.

1)?????Information shared is inaccurate and biased – History documented in books and encyclopedias has its fair share of biases and inaccuracies because “History is written by victors” as said by Winston Churchill. One example is how British atrocities in Kenya in the 1950s were improperly documented and reported until ground-breaking work by Harvard Professor Caroline Elkins, which exposed the truth and led to a 2011 court case and reparations for the Kenyan victims.

2)?????It will lead to increased plagiarism in schools – Cheating and plagiarism are not new challenges. Students have been paying others to do their research reports for decades, and the same concerns were raised when Wikipedia was launched. Innovators are already working on artificial intelligence capabilities that can detect papers that are generated by chat bots versus humans and educators will need to evolve how students are assessed.

3)?????Artificial intelligence will eliminate jobs – Throughout history, technological advances have eliminated jobs and created new ones. They have solved existing societal problems and created new ones. This cycle of life is the norm and continues today. ?Embracing the disruption versus fearing the disruption, is an important part of coping.

In Hit Refresh by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, he references Alan Kay’s quote “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”. He further encourages us to “stop predicting the future and start creating the one we want in a principled way.” It is therefore no surprise that Microsoft is one of the primary investors in OpenAI – the developer of ChatGPT. Nadella also spoke about the importance of companies taking big bets. At the time, his bets on cloud and culture were paying off and he was also betting on mixed reality, artificial intelligence and quantum computing. According to a January 2023 article in The Verge, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019; has an exclusive license to use its text generator AI GPT-3 and is now exploring integrating this game changing application into Bing, which has long lagged Google in terms of search engine prowess.

This is an important reminder for all business leaders of the importance of the Three Box Balance (Professor Vijay Govindarajan), 1) managing the present; 2) selectively forgetting the past; and 3) creating the future. Often, too much time is spent on managing the present.

If you haven’t yet, checked out ChatGPT, visit ?https://chat.openai.com/.

What tech tools/trends are you excited about for 2023?

?#Embracedisruption #openai #chatGPT #microsoft #accessibility #strategy #leadership #innovation