How ChatGPT changed the Artificial Intelligence playing field forever.
ChatGPT has done more to bring AI to the masses in the last 4 months than we’ve seen in the last decade. By offering access at no cost to everyday users, ChatGPT is encouraging widespread adoption and use by any-and-everyone. This effectively removes the “shroud of mystery” around AI as being intimidating, expensive, or aspirational – for use only by the most intelligent minds for the most complex tasks. ChatGPT is making AI usable for everyone.
Changing the World of AI Overnight
In November 2022, ChatGPT, a large language model chatbot from OpenAI, launched to the world. Adoption soared as tech geeks, business people, kids, housewives, and everyone in between logged on to see what the buzz was about. It took only 5 days for ChatGPT to reach one million users, shattering every record previously held by an online service.
And it’s easy to understand why.
ChatGPT is free to anyone, it’s easy to use, and it’s engaging.
Users can utilize it to write production descriptions, create recipes, answer basic legal questions, provide medical advice, literally anything you can think of.
And just like that, AI goes from “out of reach” to the palm of our hands, overnight.
The ChatGPT Difference
ChatGPT is unique from other chatbots in that it has been fine tuned with Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) to teach the AI what humans expect when they ask a question.
This element of human intent sets ChatGPT apart from other chatbots and search engines as it creates a conversational experience that hasn’t been achieved before.
For example, with the above example, when I asked ChatGPT, “What can I cook with ground beef, tomatoes, pasta and garlic?,” it could have simply returned an answer like:
“Italian food”
“Spaghetti”
Or like Google does, it could’ve shown me a bunch of recipes with those ingredients for me to sort through on my own, as well as other questions people ask–which is helpful, but it isn’t what I want…
Instead, because ChatGPT has been trained to go the next step and make some assumptions about what the user is trying to achieve, it instantly provided me with an entire recipe for spaghetti bolognese.
Sorprendente! (Amazing!)
Additionally, each new iteration is trained on exponentially more data than previous versions.
- GPT-2 (released Feb 2019) was trained on 1.5 Billion Parameters
- GPT-3 (released Nov 2022) was trained on 175 Billion Parameters
- GPT-4 (released March 2023) is trained on 100 TRILLION Parameters
Data about code, information from the internet, and even Reddit threads to learn dialogue, and form a human style of responding. Because of that, ChatGPT is able to provide helpful, truthful, answers to prompts it receives.
AI at Home and at Work
There are the obvious “fun” applications for ChatGPT; poems, song lyrics, recipes, etc.
But more and more professionals are asking themselves how ChatGPT might be part of their job one day. If you’re thinking about ChatGPT in the workplace, chances are you may not be the first in your organization to do so. If you’re an early-adopter of AI in your company, it might be good to understand how other companies are using ChatGPT to develop new tools or applying it to their current technology.
Both Microsoft and Salesforce are offering integrations where you can use ChatGPT to write emails. Of additional interest to sales people, ChatGPT can integrate with Google Sheets to write custom LinkedIn messages.
Salesforce is even going so far as to launch Einstein GPT which is said to be the “world’s first generative AI for CRM.” The tool will have the ability to write emails, craft responses to customers, generate targeted content for prospects and even write code for developers.
While AI won’t replace human employees in the short term, workers of any industry should be open to how AI might help them be more efficient in their existing roles. Teams are already using AI to:
- Debug software
- Deliver sales pitches
- Draft skeletons for white papers
- Create content with SEO keywords
- Write blog posts, emails, manuals and more
However, the technology does have limitations. While it may understand general industry insights, ChatGPT will not have deep insights about your business, your data, or your customers. It is also limited as far as creating visuals. It’s currently able to create simple tables, but not more complex visualizations such as graphs and charts.
What’s next for technology?
ChatGPT-4 launched Tuesday, March 14th, 2023 and for the time being is only available to ChatGPT Plus users and developers. The most notable new feature is the ability to understand photos and eventually even video inputs. This will be huge for teams looking to gather insights from slides, graphs, infographics, and other multi-media content.
Additionally, the tool has already advanced light years in the world of development. During a livestream demonstration of the platform’s new capabilities, ChatGPT-4 acted as a Discord Bot that created a functioning website with only a hand-drawn image as reference. Pretty incredible to say the least.
Regulating AI
With AI saturating more and more of our everyday lives, the call for safe, ethical development is getting louder and louder.
OpenAI founder Sam Altman has shared his vision for “artificial general intelligence” which is the point where AI can think and act like a human across a wide range of cognitive tasks. Due to its potential to transform many aspects of society, “careful planning and collaboration is needed to ensure its safe and beneficial development.”
Steps towards that goal include OpenAI joining what’s called a “regulatory sandbox” where governance of new technologies can be shared. These sandboxes are already in use to help manage privacy risks and protect data.
The European Union is also proposing the “AI Act” which aims to regulate the use of AI across the EU. The goal is to become the “global standard” for what extent AI is able to positively or negatively impact our lives.
The Future is Here
ChatGPT has certainly revolutionized the world of AI, and it’s amazing to think that it’s something that almost anyone can use. Not only is it fun to experiment with but you could even utilize this technology in the workplace to increase productivity or develop new ideas and concepts. With their latest release of ChatGPT-4, OpenAI has made huge strides in the platform capabilities. The progress in AI continues to be exciting, yet it comes with certain ethical and regulatory considerations that will need to be addressed in the future. We look forward to seeing all the developments and advancements ChatGPT will bring us next.
