Bots for chat are not new. They have existed in some capacity since the 1960s. But ChatGPT, the conversational chatbot that has fascinated investors, IT titans, and the general public since its November launch, has something unique to offer.
The internet is already brimming with suggestions for ways to leverage ChatGPT’s human-like dialogue, from developing personalised chatbots to assist with traffic tickets to developing exercise and diet regimens.
The more important question is whether ChatGPT (or more precisely, the technology behind it) will have the same profound impact as previous ground-breaking inventions of our generation, such as the iPhone, Google search, and Amazon Alexa.
Before we know the answer to that question, years may pass. However, 2023 is expected to bring a flood of new ChatGPT-powered goods, applications, and services, according to specialists in artificial intelligence. It might alter how we communicate with chatbots for customer care, voice-activated virtual assistants like Alexa or Siri, search engines, and even email inboxes.
According to Oren Etzioni, advisor and board member of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, “we’re likely to witness a major step-up in the conversational skills of chatbots and voice assistants within six months or so.”
In 2023, ChatGPT’s potential influence on how we work is already a major news topic. A faster-performing professional premium version of ChatGPT is in the works, according to Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI, who tweeted the news on January 10. According to claims from The Information, Microsoft, an investor in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is planning to integrate the technology into Bing, Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint. ChatGPT has been restricted on educational devices by the New York City Department of Education due to “concerns about adverse effects on student learning.” Additionally, according to The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI is debating a tender offer that would possibly value the business at $29 billion, making it one of the most valuable US startups.
According to the hype cycle of things, Michael Chui, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, “clearly this has captivated the interest right now.” “However, improvements that eventually find their way into practical use cases in business are frequently hidden under a hype cycle. And that’s already started.”
What is ChatGPT and how does it work?
OpenAI claims that ChatGPT, a free chatbot that is offered online as a research preview, will allow the system to learn from actual use. Simple questions like “Show me healthy dinner ideas” or “What’s the best approach to answer the “tell me about yourself” question in a job interview” can be asked to ChatGPT. However, ChatGPT also has the ability to compose songs, poetry, and essays. You may ask it to manage your to-do list, write a holiday card, or even generate a resignation letter.
Large amounts of human-written material from the internet, including conversations, are used to train the AI. However, because ChatGPT cannot access the internet, it occasionally provides inaccurate results and only has a limited amount of knowledge.
ChatGPT became popular overnight thanks to its remarkably human-like writing style and assurance when responding to inquiries. According to Brockman’s tweets from the beginning of December, the programme reached one million users in its first five days.
When referring to ChatGPT and other software tools that employ comparable AI techniques to produce art, such as OpenAI’s Dall-E, Chui noted, “They do things that many of us would reply [with] ‘Oh those are the types of things that we expect people to do.
Improved chatbots and more practical office supplies
As my colleague David Lumb noted in December, there are numerous one-off instances of how ChatGPT is already being used to assist with routine tasks like making grocery lists and bedtime stories. Less certain is how and whether the technology underlying ChatGPT will play a bigger part in the apps and services we use on a daily basis. One of the greatest sectors that experts believe will have an impact is the chatbot market, especially when it comes to customer care representatives.
GPT-3, a variation of the language model that drives ChatGPT, is already used by Ada, a firm that provides AI-powered customer care capabilities to companies like Meta, Square, and Verizon. Ada revealed on December 20 that it would use OpenAI technology more thoroughly into its goods.
In the future, common voicebots like Siri and Alexa might also profit from the technology.
Set my alarm at 5 o’clock, you don’t need to run ChatGPT, explained Etzioni. But these voice assistants will undoubtedly have considerably better conversational skills in the future.
The next-generation office assistant function is one more promising use for ChatGPT. Technology has the potential to assist with anything from writing code, emails, and job descriptions, according to experts. GPT-3 is already used by businesses like Jasper and Unbounce to power AI-powered copywriting solutions that produce taglines, social media copy, emails, and product descriptions.
The Information claims that Microsoft plans to integrate the ChatGPT AI model into Outlook so that it can retrieve accurate search results from your mailbox even if you don’t write the right keywords. The report claims that the business has also considered employing OpenAI’s software to build chatbots inside Word and Outlook that might compose material in response to prompts.
With a tool called Github Copilot that uses an Open AI AI model called OpenAI Codex to recommend both individual lines of code and entire functions, Microsoft has also been investigating how AI may speed up the process of producing code.
Yoon Kim, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, asserted that ChatGPT “will also potentially be a game changer in the realm of coding.” It would be much simpler to ask a chatbot to correct a coding fault than to Google a problem and look for related solutions, which is the standard procedure Kim says most coders follow when they run into a problem.
Additional conversational search outcomes
People have compared ChatGPT to search because of its capacity to present information in a conversational manner, which has raised the question of whether comparable tools would ever completely replace Google. It’s simple to see why even after using ChatGPT for a short while. ChatGPT can respond to inquiries like “How can I get rid of fruit flies?” and “Which family in Game of Thrones is most powerful?” similar to a search engine. Instead of offering a variety of article excerpts and links, ChatGPT offers a straightforward solution with the procedures as indicated below.
It’s possible that ChatGPT and search engines can perform some of the same duties, but ChatGPT is much more constrained at the moment because it can’t search the web for solutions. As a result, it will respond with an answer like the one below if you ask it, “What are the top movies on Netflix right now?”
However, it doesn’t imply that tech oligopolies aren’t considering how to include it into search engines. According to The Information, Microsoft is getting ready to roll out a version of Bing that makes use of the ChatGPT AI to provide some search queries with more conversational results. Before the end of March, the functionality might become available. According to the source, ChatGPT would probably be used to enhance how search results are presented to users as it cannot explore the web.
In late 2022, You.com, a search engine that debuted in 2021, started providing a chatbot that resembled ChatGPT on its website.
According to The New York Times, Google management declared a “code red” in response to ChatGPT’s public release. According to the source, teams within the corporation have been allocated to work on AI technologies between now and the anticipated company conference in May. Additionally, Google has its own language model, known as LaMDA. This summer, former engineer Blake Lemoine openly expressed his concerns about the technology becoming sentient. (Google said that Lemoine’s accusations were unsupported by any proof in a response to The Washington Post.) The informal style of ChatGPT is also comparable to the strategy used by Google in its voice assistant and search engine. Prior to a user tapping a link, what began as a list of blue links has transformed into a tapestry of information panels, snippets, and image carousels. It is simple to understand how providing conversational responses to searches, much like ChatGPT provides, might increase the effectiveness of Google’s search results. Over the past four years, the Google Assistant has developed new skills as it has gotten more conversational, including the capacity to wait on hold and make appointments for you at restaurants.
But it’ll probably take a while before a chatbot like ChatGPT can deliver outcomes that are as precise and reliable as Google’s. According to Kim, an MIT professor, what we’re more likely to see is a hybrid system that combines conventional search results with ChatGPT’s conversational display.
According to Kim, the system “can create a seamless natural language response utilising the search engine results, but also indicate the sources that it used to create the response.” That sounds a lot like the Bing features Microsoft is allegedly developing.
