chatgpt: Breaking down the hype

Why the sudden surge in popularity?

Well, it’s new, and following the first phase of the classic Gartner Hype Cycle where early stories are emerging and it is attracting a lot of media attention. See below for their Hype Cycle tailored for Emerging Tech: 

It has raised a lot of questions as people grapple with the impacts, work through the noise, use cases, value, limitations and figure out what it means so it may be while before things to settle down and we start to get a clearer view of what it is truly capable of and how we can best work with it. 

What are the benefits?

So far, there are a few: 

• Variety: it can perform several tasks such as answering questions, summarising text, translation, and image creation. 
• Fast: responses are generated in real time 
• Free: currently, it remains free to use though this may change to a freemium model or similar 
• Human-like, conversational responses: it’s been trained and is continued to be trained on a huge dataset of human-generated text 

How could my business use this? 

One of the most high profile use cases is Microsoft who invested $1 billion into OpenAI and looking to integrate into its search engine Bing to create a more conversational search engine as part of its efforts to gain market share from industry leader Google. 

There are plenty of companies using it, looking at it, and commentary around potential use cases, such as: 

• Drafting copy including: 

Simplify and summarise complex content (e.g., legal matters) 

Product guides 

Keyword research for search engine marketing 

• It can help draft responses and make existing chatbot experiences more conversational, which could provide value in situations where human-like conversation with customers is preferred. For example, think about airlines using chatbots to triage queries, with the bot handling simpler questions and escalating as necessary to people either in the same channel or other. It can also provide further opportunities to automate parts of the customer and employee experience 
• Writing and reviewing code in IT 

More broadly, generative AI can be even do things such as create slide presentations, creating diagrams, images and more. All these use cases have the potential to drive significant efficiencies, saving time and money. 

If you are considering it for your business, you may want and see how the offering evolves and improves beyond the initial hype. Do your homework, have a look at research, read the news and while it’s free you can jump in and have a play to see what it is all about. 

What are things I need to be aware of? 

While is plenty of excitement around ChatGPT and Generative AI more broadly, it is still a nascent technology, and even OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman tweeted caution, stating: 

“ChatGPT is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness. it’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now. it’s a preview of progress; we have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness” 

Some of the current considerations and limitations are: 

• Recency: ChatGPT’s was created with data up to 2021, so is unable to provide context on recent events 
• Context matters: where prompts are too vague, or something niche, it may struggle to provide accurate information. Essentially, the quality of output depends on the quality of input. 
• Ethical concerns: It does raise some ethical concerns. A digital mental health company faced heat for using GPT as an experiment for support messages without informing users. 
• Bias: it is trained on human-generated text, which may contain bias in language and information 
• Meaning: it is trained to provide words based on input, but is limited in interpreting meaning behind words 
• Limited understanding the complexities and nuances in human language and conversation such as idioms and sarcasm so may misinterpret inputs with results impacted accordingly