What is Chat GPT?
Chat GPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is an Artificiall Intelligence chat bot developed by OpenAI. Open AI was co-founded by Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Sam Altman, and Wojciech Zaremba. However, Elon Musk resigned from the board of OpenAI in 2018 due to potential conflicts of interest with his other ventures.
ChatGPT is a language model that works by using a deep neural network architecture called a transformer. The transformer is trained on a large corpus of text data, which allows it to learn the patterns and relationships between words and phrases in the language.
The end result of this technology is a chat bot that in many ways can simulate human intelligence by answering questions, or prompts, in a way that human would. The vast training data set means that it can perform a multitude of tasks, such as computer programming to writing and essay or an e-mail.
If you’d like to try it, you can sing up for an account at OpenAI or you can find the technology in a slightly different form through Bing Chat.
2023 is the Year People Discover ChatGPT
ChatGPT has been in development since 2017 and is currently in its third generation, GPT-3.
The GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) model was officially released by OpenAI in June 2020. At the time it was most advanced version of the GPT model and used 175 billion parameters, making it the largest language model ever created.
The software has constantly been improved over the last several years, and it is rumored that GPT-4 will soon be released. The expected improvements include being trained on an even larger dataset as well as a better ability to synthesize data for more concise, faster, and accurate answers to questions.
At some point in late 2022, the internet began paying more and more attention to this breakthrough technology and tens of thousands of articles began being published as ChatGPT entered the mainstream. Hundreds of Youtubers videos have been published about how people can instantly become millionaires with the new technology and nobody will ever have to work ever again.
We find these claims a little farfetched, but do believe that ChatGPT will be a true turning point for artificial intelligence as OpenAI and its competitors move closer towards achieving Artificial General Intelligence or the creation of a machine with human like intelligence.
We at the AI tipping point with Chat GPT
One of the best articles about Chat GPT was written by Ethan Mollick of the Wharton Business School, ChatGPT Is a Tipping Point for AI (hbr.org).
Ethan’s article asks whether or not we are at an AI tipping point. We believe that Chat GPT is the starting point of the general public become aware of a truly useful Artificial Intelligence. The service is easy to use, free, and useful for a wide range of use cases from content creation to acting as a trusted advisor for a wide range of topics. It is reshaping how companies and people use computers. Chat GPT will change form significantly in the future where other companies will expand on its usefulness and creative people will find new and exciting ways to integrate the technology into their own solutions. Artificial intelligence is permeating business at last | The Economist
2024 is the Year Chat GPT Begins Eliminating Jobs
In early 2023, the benefits of Chat GPT have yet to be seen. While you can sign up for an account with OpenAI and Bing is integrating the technology into its Search results, the true benefits are going to come when the masses of people begin using the technology without knowing it.
The people reading this article are ahead of the curve and are actively learning about this new game changing technology.
The masses of people around the world will begin using Natural Language Processing technology as it is integrated into more and more products. Microsoft Azure OpenAI Cognitive Services and OpenAI both make an API available for software developers to integrate the tech into their own products. It will take time for them to do so.
Microsoft Windows had over 1.3 billion active Windows 10 devices in 2021. Most of these computers have some form of Microsoft Office installed on them. As Microsoft Word, Excel, Power BI, and countless other products embed the technology people will begin to see increasing productivity gains as they spend less time on Google searching for answers or spend less time creating solutions to their problems through partial automation of common tasks.
You Don’t Have to Eliminate Full Jobs to Eliminate Jobs
Imagine a Contact Center with 100 employees working there, answering customer questions and helping them resolve issues. If Chat GPT can divert 20% of the incoming calls by answering them through an online chat bot that’s actually useful, then you need 20 less Contact Center employees.
The remaining 80 people working at the contact center are taking calls that couldn’t be diverted. They use an internal version of Chat GPT that’s been trained on company policies and procedures. As a customer is asking them questions, they are referencing Chat GPT instead of placing people on hold or transferring them to a different department. This could eliminate some of the managerial staff, half of the department specialists, and frees up call center employees to take more calls in a day, further eliminating another 20% of the jobs.
In total, a Chat GPT style solution adds so much efficiency that the Contact Center can be operated with 50% less employees and provide the same or better service level.
Chat GPT Will Eliminate Jobs Across All Industries
Some groups of workers seem to be immune from their job being impacted by Chat GPT, but we disagree. Jobs that are mostly manual labor that pay a decent wage typically require some type of training. For example, let’s look at an automotive technician.
An automotive technician will typically spend a year or two in technical training learning how different systems on vehicles work and may specialize in vehicles from a specific manufacturer. Then the career path is to start as an apprentice and work their way up to a Master Technician or Shop Foreman after gaining years of experience and have a wide body of knowledge in their area of specialty.
Chat GPT reduces the learning curve to becoming an automotive technician. Rather than having to learn a body of knowledge, it could be easy to reference or it could even make insightful guesses as to what the technical problem is that a car is having. An artificial intelligence could also assign probabilities to each one of the possible causes based on thousands of similar cars having similar issues. A mechanic working at a single auto shop would not have the breadth of knowledge that an Artificial Intelligence would have.
In this example, more people are enabled to become automotive technicians and average technicians could complete the work of a master mechanic. They could also spend less time on diagnostics and more time turning wrenches and fixing cars at least partially eliminating the number of mechanics needed to maintain the same service level.
A Recession will Massively Accelerate Job Elimination
Nobody knows when the next recession will occur. However, during the last recession entire industries were reshaped by necessity. Companies desperate to save money and maintain sales levels will reduce headcount as a necessary precaution. When headcounts decrease, the remaining employees are forced to find more efficient ways to complete tasks. The longer that the recession endures, the less jobs there are for people to come back to.
With Chat GPT being one of the most influential pieces of technology to increase productivity in many people’s lifetimes it’s likely that its true potential won’t be seen until deep into the next recession.
What Can You do to Prepare for the AI Revolution?
The Harvard Business Review recently published an article for Young Professionals and what they should know about Generative AI and we agree with many of the key points in the article.
The first thing that people should do is to learn as much as they can about the new technology. Following websites like ours will help you have an understanding of what is coming and give you ideas of how you can use new technology as a tool to help you excel in the workplace. A lot of people will be in the position of being blindsided by technological change and will not know how to adapt.
Secondly, people need to spend time learning how to use new technology as a tool to help them complete their tasks fast and more efficiently. When job performance is being reviewed, managers will not care that Person A completed 4 times as much work as Person B because they had help from AI. They will only recognize that Person A completed 4 times as much work putting them at the bottom of the list of jobs that will be eliminated.
What Comes after Chat GPT?
The biggest differentiator of Chat GPT compared to most AI solutions is that it’s useful and easy to use. People with zero understanding of how computers, AI, machine learning, and other advanced algorithms work know that they can ask a question and receive an answer. The groundbreaking aspect is the ease of use, and how many use cases it can be applied to.
Applied Artificial Intelligence is going to be the ongoing trend of the next several years. It will be integrated into more and more software, to the point where you likely won’t know that AI is generating content or answering complex questions.
One of the most interesting startups in the Digital Transformation space is Adept.AI While still in beta, take a look at their blog. They have some video examples of a combination of Natural Language Processing being used to describe tasks that would traditionally be completed through Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automate tasks that would take someone a significant amount of time to script.
The traditional question is What is the difference between RPA vs. AI? The future question is what does RPA plus AI look like?