ChatGPT and the Revolution of Artificial Intelligence

We discuss the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and why your business won't want to be left behind.

Artificial intelligence has been around for a long time. Its technology is a crucial component of some of the biggest companies in the world and impacts the daily lives of a large majority of the global population. The personally curated ‘feeds’ which form the core of such services as TikTok, YouTube and Instagram are powered by such machine learning algorithms, as is the search engine and advertising technology of Google.

The big question however, is can machines really ‘think’? Many people will have heard by now about ‘ChatGPT’, a new chatbot by a company called OpenAI which is causing quite a stir. It is being said that this chatbot really does appear to be able to ‘think’. Now it may be that that is a premature and sensationalised claim, but the truth is that the results of this development are astonishing.

The concept of AI has a wide variety of applications across all disciplines. For example, a problem which was long thought impossible, a holy grail of biology, is the problem of protein folding. Long thought of as unsolvable, DeepMind’s AlphaFold in 2018 made a major breakthrough, which has since been used to construct a database of protein structures. This has had profound impacts on many related fields of biological research.

These accomplishments are revolutionary, as is the fact that they have come so soon, greatly exceeding expectations. Yet it is not until the last year or so that the capabilities of artificial intelligence have really been brought home to the average person. The ground-breaking nature of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s latest project, is in its wide general applicability across all sectors.

The impact of ChatGPT

There’s no doubt that ChatGPT is the closest thing we have yet encountered to a machine that can ‘think’, and that future iterations of it will come closer and closer to that ideal. ChatGPT is a highly sophisticated language processing system that can understand a sentence with limited context, can infer that context in much the same way that a human speaker can, and can give an appropriate and helpful response.

If we think about the uses this functionality can have in a business context, we quickly realize that the possibilities are endless. Imagine a help chat on a website which is genuinely informative; can ask questions about the user’s particular problem; give highly specific advice; and give the user the feeling that their issue is being addressed by an individual.

Now imagine if this chat could support an almost indefinite number of simultaneous users, for an almost negligible price, when compared with the costs involved in having employees operate these kinds of chats. We no longer need to imagine these things, OpenAI have just released their ChatGPT and Whisper APIs for developers. This means the power of this cutting edge technology is now available for anyone to integrate into whatever product or service they may have in mind.

What are the business implications?

The sky is the limit here. But aspiring technical innovators had better act fast, as competition in this space is set to be fast-paced. Big players are already rolling out their AI leveraging products, such as Microsoft's Bing giving Google a run for its money. Snapchat has "My AI" for Snapchat+, Quizlet has Q-Chat, and Shopify has a new ChatGPT powered shopping assistant, which will make tailored recommendations to the user as they search, greatly streamlining the online shopping process.

The bottom line here is that almost any kind of business can adapt this technology to fit their needs and provide a more effective, more consistent customer service, at a reduced cost. ChatGPT can be used to provide real time user interaction, as well as produce static text content. Simply describe the kind of content needed, and the copy is automatically written. Then manually edit the result, and the whole process is made much more efficient, hugely saving time and money. ChatGPT and the related technologies can even be used to write code!

In short, almost any professional would do well to get up to date with these developments and consider the impact. At Cambridge Kinetics, we've all adopted AI technologies such as GitHub Copilot to speed up our development workflows to great success. From what we have seen, all businesses would do well to prepare themselves for the paradigm shift that is about to come. AI is set to transform what productivity looks like at work, and the time to embrace this technology and get ahead is now.