ChatGPT- Is it too early to say that a massive disruption is on way?

“Innovations and disruptions are the hallmarks of the technological world, and hardly a moment passes when we are not thinking, doing or talking about these topics.”

While the technological world may be in awe of a lot of things that bewilder the sharpest human minds, chatGPT is yet another child of technology that promises an astonishing technological renaissance. Yes! For all the attention it is garnering and some obvious reasons that follow, ChatGPT is just highly disruptive. The ground breaking product it is turning out to be, it is bound to shake up industries in the near future.

What is it actually?

ChatGPT, an abbreviated version of ‘chat generative pre trained transformer,’ is a by-product of machine learning or a large learning model (LLM) is an artificial intelligence driven chatbot that is trained on vast amounts of data that can predict what the next word in a sentence is likely to be. It is just simple to understand that the more data it is trained on, the more kinds of tasks it is able to accomplish. It is just overwhelmingly phenomenal. In fact, ChatGPT, as it looks from initial impressions, is appearing to be one of the most advanced and promising feathers in the cap of technology.

One may be surprised to know that ChatGPT has succeeded its predecessor InstructGPT by lessening the occurrence of inappropriate, inaccurate and often deceitful responses- that’s why perhaps all the regard for ChatGPT there is.

What does the above statement mean?

To make the above statement limpid, whereas InstructGPT accepts the premise of the prompt “tell me about where was the first robotic food delivery made, let’s say in the year 2020, as being truthful, its successor, ChatGPT, acknowledges the counterfactual nature of the question and frames its answer as a hypothetical consideration of what and how it might happen, accessing information about the stage it is in, and innovations and developments in automated mechanisms and robotics food delivery.”

What does ChatGPT do?

With artificial intelligence at the helm of affairs, ChatGPT is a chatbot that was launched by OpenAI only recently. It found its way out in November of 2022. In fact, its prototype was launched initially that immediately caught the attention of people worldwide for its elaborate responses and articulate answers across several domains of knowledge- viz a viz technology, healthcare, business, its ability to write essays, develop engaging content, compose music and fairy tales, to emulate a Linux system and to even simulate an entire chat room.

ChatGPT is just highly versatile. With such a ground breaking technology at hand, it is bound to make its impact felt across numerous domains existing today. Though not all the impacts would be positive, but there are, as several reports have observed until now, bound to be some negative consequences too.

What? OMG! ChatGPT clears MBA exam

Yes! You are not inebriated since you read it right. As much as ChatGPT is turning out to be a technological phenomenon in itself, results that arise out of its use are just driving people equally crazy. In a recent report published in several newspapers and one which is lately doing the rounds across social media websites and platforms, ChatGPT, in all its uniqueness, has just quite successfully aced the MBA exam at the Wharton school of the University of Pennyslvania, one of the top business institutions in the world. What’s more to the interest and bewilderment of people is that ChatGPT, powered by an AI-chatbot, can draft emails and also write plays and poetry for you in a plethora of tones and styles based on the commands it is provided with.

Christian Terwiesch, a Professor at the University of Pennysylvania, observed that ChatGPT not only provided great explanations but it also answered the questions about operations management quite successfully.

Academic concerns about ChatGPT

While some academicians in California termed ChatGPT as something that would usher in “the end of high school English”, some others pointed out that teachers should be concerned about students using ChatGPT to outsource their writing.

The growing use of ChatGPT in academic structures has led to a student at Princeton university to create GPTzero, a program that determines how much of a context is AI-generated. This has helped institutions fight growing academic plagiarism. In fact, the adverse effect of ChatGPT is so feared that as of January 4, 2023, the New York City Department of Education has restricted access to ChatGPT from its public school internet and devices. Well! That’s alarming and the threat of disruption it brings with itself rings the bell for non-academic industries too.

ChatGPT- Reactions garnered and milestones achieved

While on one hand the world’s leading newspaper ‘The New York Times’ labelled it "the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public", on the other hand, Samantha Lock of ‘The Guardian’ noted that it was able to generate "impressively detailed" and "human-like" text.

Technology writer Dan Gillmor used ChatGPT on a student assignment, and found its generated text was at par with what a good student would deliver and opined that "academia has some very serious issues to confront".

Alex Kantrowitz of Slate magazine lauded ChatGPT's pushback to questions related to Nazi Germany, including the claim that Adolf Hitler built highways in Germany, which was met with information regarding Nazi Germany's use of forced labor.

Similarly, in The Atlantic's "Breakthroughs of the Year" for 2022, Derek Thompson included ChatGPT as part of "the generative-AI eruption" that "may change our mind about how we work, how we think, and what human creativity really is".

Kelsey Piper of the Vox website wrote that "ChatGPT is the general public's first hands-on introduction to how powerful modern AI has gotten, and as a result, many of us are stunned" and that "ChatGPT is smart enough to be useful despite its flaws".

Paul Graham of Y Combinator tweeted that "The striking thing about the reaction to ChatGPT is not just the number of people who are blown away by it, but who they are. These are not people who get excited by every shiny new thing. Clearly, something big is happening."

Elon Musk wrote that "ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI". Musk paused OpenAI's access to a Twitter database pending a better understanding of OpenAI's plans, stating that "OpenAI was started as open-source and non-profit. Neither is still true." Musk had co-founded OpenAI in 2015, in part to address existential risk from artificial intelligence, but had resigned in 2018.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai upended the work of numerous internal groups in response to the threat of disruption by ChatGPT.

Similarly, recently in December 2022, Google internally expressed concerns and alarm at the unexpected strength of ChatGPT and the newly discovered potential of large language models to disrupt the search engine business, and CEO Sundar Pichai "upended" and reassigned teams within multiple departments to aid in its artificial intelligence products, according to The New York Times. The Information reported on January 3, 2023 that Microsoft Bing was planning to add optional ChatGPT functionality into its public search engine, possibly around March 2023.

Limitations and challenges-

As observed by Professor Terwiesch, ChatGPT, despite all its capabilities and efficiencies, also had several shortcomings. He said that it occasionally produced ‘surprising errors’ in school level math. Well, one does not know, when these errors can be of enormous size.

OpenAI also humbly submits the fact that ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.

According to the BBC, as of December 2022 ChatGPT is not allowed to "express political opinions or engage in political activism". Yet, research suggests that ChatGPT exhibits a pro-environmental, left-libertarian orientation when prompted to take a stance on political statements from two established voting advice applications.

Wrapping up

With artificial intelligence at the helm of affairs of ChatGPT, times ahead are certainly unpredictable yet intriguing. While on one hand it signals great advancement of industries, on the other hand, it can create an environment of uncertainty, inaccuracy or incompleteness by virtue of providing inappropriate, false or inadequate information.

Whatever be its outcome, as of now, it is just a thing to curiously watch out for- something which is extremely technology dependent, future driven and highly automated- a thing that leaves us all baffled and in a bit of awe.

However, despite its many obvious merits and negative implications, ChatGPT has just been able to stay on top of the news charts all these days. In fact, it’s company OpenAI, was valued at $29 billion, following the release of ChatGPT.

Does it signal something strongly about the AI-dependent times to arrive? Or is it just a bubble that is going to burst much sooner than later?

Only time will respond accurately to the above doubts that we all have in mind regarding ChatGPT.