By Achin Sharma
The advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a field of study can be traced back to the 1940s, but its implementation for enhancing productivity and obtaining insightful analytics through modeling is not a novel concept. In fact, industrial AI has been a focal point for development since the 1980s. Over the past decade, especially in recent years, AI has permeated into various facets of our daily lives, from smartphones, chatbots, and automobiles, to numerous digital touchpoints . One of the most ubiquitous applications of AI has been the creation of intelligent chatbots. These automated systems can optimize costs by performing repetitive tasks and managing multiple queries without requiring additional human resources. Powered by Natural Language Processing (NLP) and other Machine Learning algorithms, AI chatbots offer a human-like experience and are trained to mimic natural conversation through ongoing usage.
The initial generation of chatbots was designed to cater to standard business processes, such as customer service and sales inquiries, while the latest iteration has diversified into specialized niches, such as logo design, resume writing, music creation, podcast editing, meeting insights capture, and video editing. The sheer variety of AI chatbots available in the market today is virtually limitless.
One of the buzzwords currently making rounds in the tech industry is ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer), a conversational AI-powered chatbot developed by Open AI, which was launched in November 2022. ChatGPT is built on OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of large language models and has been fine-tuned using both Supervised and Reinforcement learning techniques to mimic human responses. This chatbot has been trained on massive amounts of data gleaned from the internet.
ChatGPT’s impact on the tech industry has been seismic since its launch, as it garnered one million users in just five days. This is an unprecedented feat, surpassing even leading social media platforms and microblogging sites. Its impressive capabilities have been widely reported, ranging from helping a Wharton professor clear an MBA exam to debugging and writing programming code, composing articles, stories, prose, music, solving math problems, doing translations, and more. The meteoric rise of ChatGPT has sparked concern among social media giants and the dominant search engine, which has become an integral part of our daily lives. Some reports suggest that the search engine has gone back to its founders in response to the threat posed by ChatGPT. Another e-commerce giant has instructed its employees to not share any confidential information with the AI chatbot.
For those who have not yet had the opportunity to try ChatGPT, I highly recommend visiting chat.openail.com, creating an account, and initiating a chat. Note that advanced usage requires authorization and an API key to access the full capabilities of the ChatGPT model. There have been complaints about access difficulties due to high demand but be wary of fraudulent apps posing as ChatGPT on app stores, which may be attempting to track users.
The million-dollar question is whether ChatGPT constitutes a genuine threat to humanity and major search engine giants.
Here’s my take:
– While its ability to demonstrate human-like intelligence has caused a degree of alarm, it cannot completely replace human jobs, but rather will augment efficiency and agility.
– It has already generated a lot of concerns about the misuse of the tool by users e.g. Stanford researchers have developed a tool, DetectGPT that will help teachers identify the content generated using ChatGPT or similar tools by the students.
– In the long run, the chatbot will need an extensive amount of data to maintain its competency, giving the dominant search engine a distinct advantage due to its extensive data collection over the years.
Furthermore, while ChatGPT is marketed as an open-source product, the reality is that one major technology giant has invested approximately USD 10 billion into the AI chatbot, likely for strategic purposes and to enhance its product offerings.
In my opinion, the other players will come up with similar products and tools to detect ChatGPT output in the next few months. And this healthy competition will benefit the end customers as we might see the evolution of a totally new breed of such tools.
(The author is a senior IT leader with over two decades of Industry Experience, he is currently heading IT for logistics company.)
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