Should Your Company Use ChatGPT?

When I graduated from college, the prevailing belief in computer science was that artificial general intelligence was just around the corner. Over the many years since, you can imagine that I became skeptical.

My Experience with ChatGPT

When I first heard about ChatGPT back in January, I didn't have high expectations. However, I have a personal writing project I have been working on. Since ChatGPT was potentially useful in writing, I tried it.

Its ability to analyze my chapters intrigued me, providing very useful suggestions. Unfortunately, the web interface for ChatGPT is a bit time consuming to use with something as large as a book. Fortunately, the OpenAI developer’s API was released just in time. With developer’s access, I worked on a more advanced analysis of my writing. I found that one prompt gave me limited results. I wondered if I could create a program to run many prompts and pull the results into one report. My application ended up using about one hundred prompts to get what I wanted, and this is just the beginning.

What surprised me more is how ChatGPT assisted me in creating the application. The API uses the programming language python, which I didn’t know. But, that is alright, I could just ask ChatGPT what to do. To me, it was a whole new learning paradigm. At first I didn’t know any python, but as I worked, I picked it up quickly. When I got stuck, I just asked ChatGPT. That cycle made for extremely fast improvement.

The more I experimented, the more I realized this technology would revolutionize everything. In the past six months, it has puzzled me why no one at work is talking about this. A company that fully embraces this would be hard to compete with. The difference between using it and not using it is just too great.

Security Concerns

I understand there's a concern that everything you type into ChatGPT is saved, potentially making it accessible to competitors. It is kind of true. ChatGPT is a Large Language Model (LLM) that has processed billions of documents, web pages, books, source code, etc. It is not a database full of pre-canned answers to questions. When you ask it a question, ChatGPT is generating a few characters at a time in a loop asking ‘what characters are most likely to come next’ over and over until it has a complete answer. Even if you uploaded all your company’s source code or documents, it would be very unlikely that someone else would get more than a few words or lines of code that you input. Even that would occur in the future, since the model isn’t updated in real-time. All of that being said, I agree the risk is not zero.

There is some good news, you can simply opt-out of ChatGPT keeping your user content for future training. Another way to protect your data is to get developer access to GPT directly, which does not keep your data for training. This bypasses the web-based chat interface and works directly with the model. With developer’s access, there is also a web interface called ‘The Playground’ where you can interact in the same way as with ChatGPT. The downside to this is that they charge the usage as you go. So, over a month you could end up paying more than ChatGPT.

Productivity Improvements

After opting out of tracking, the next step is to look at how ChatGPT can improve productivity. Almost everyone has seen videos of ChatGPT answering some question or another. Since negative headlines get more clicks, most of the videos are of ChatGPT giving a silly answer. My favorite videos are when people ask a Large Language Model a Math question, then dismissing ChatGPT as useless because the answer is wrong. To me, this is like asking an English Professor a math question. You might even get the right answer. The reality is that ChatGPT can be very useful for a number of different tasks. You just have to understand what it is, and how to use it.

Over my time using ChatGPT, I have started to think of it as a calculator. Technically, I can do math problems with a paper and pencil. Of course, the bigger the problem, the longer it will take. But, if I use a calculator, it will take seconds. I still have to know the math, but when I use a calculator, it takes a small fraction of the time. If used right, ChatGPT gets you that same improvement in time. Days shrink to hours, hours shrink to minutes, minutes shrink to seconds. It is that powerful.

ChatGPT for Writing and Programming

Two areas where it is particularly useful are writing and programming. At first, writing only sounds useful to high school and college students writing term papers. But, I think it could be quite useful in a business. ChatGPT can be very helpful for writing things like documentation, company news postings, TPS reports, etc. You would have to edit the results, but it can save a lot of time.

It is also incredibly useful for programming. Not only can it instantly produce code, but it can also do things like write test code and analyze exceptions. Yes, a programmer can go to Stack Overflow and find example code or get help with an exception. ChatGPT is just much faster. It is a tool, like the calculator, that speeds the entire process up.

Conclusion

Should your company use ChatGPT? That is obviously up to each company to answer for themselves. However, I believe that companies that don't adopt this technology risk lagging behind their competitors. In fact, given that the AI technology is growing exponentially, if your company isn’t already using ChatGPT, it may already be too late. If your competition started using the technology early and you haven’t started, yet it may be impossible to catch up.

Are you using ChatGPT? Post a comment with your favorite use case.