ChatGPT – Future lies in Artificial Intelligence?

Have you ever wondered if Artificial Intelligence (AI) could make conversations, respond to queries or write articles, applications or even codes? With the launch of  the sensational ChatGPT chatbot, Microsoft has triggered a race to AI-enabled applications which are capable of human-like efficacy.

Unlike other computer based programs, will this AI based application replace workforce or enable humans to perform even better in their day to day tasks? In this article, let’s find out what ChatBPT is capable of and how it will impact the common work culture in future.

Image Credit: Pixabay

Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer or ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot released by artificial intelligence research firm called OpenAI. The AI chatbot has taken the world by storm after it was launched in November 2022. It became the fastest online platform to reach 100 million active monthly users, a milestone it touched in January, just two months after its launch. The quick popularity witnessed by ChatGPT has its rivals alarmed, especially after its parent company OpenAI bagged investment of US$ 10 billion from tech giant Microsoft.

So what exactly ChatGPT do? ChatGPT is a conversational AI model that has been trained on a massive corpus of text data, allowing it to generate human-like responses to a wide range of topics. The chatbot uses a transformer architecture, a type of neural network which is highly effective for natural language processing tasks.

Uses of ChatGPT

The newly popular AI chatbot offers great support in fields like media, teaching and more. Below are listed some of the tasks tested and accomplished by ChatGPT:

• Generate texts on specific topic, write stories, poems or articles along with content creation process for social media posts etc.
• Translate text from one language to another
• Producing humanlike chatbot responses
• Generating computer codes
• Summarizing data in tables and spreadsheets
• Performing calculations

Similar platforms available

Although ChatGPT offers number of benefits, it comes with a few limitations like incapability of giving answers prior to 2021, inability to generate visuals or graphics, no voice assistance, unresponsive page etc. This has led to other tech companies like Google and Chinese tech company Baidu, coming up with their own AI chatbots. Here are some of the rival chatbots available for use and ready for launch:

1. Google’s Bard: Recently announced by Google, Bard is a conversational AI chatbot which can provide conversational responses to questions posed by users via text. Similar to ChatGPT, Bard can write an essay, give suggestions among various other things. The AI service is powered by Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) which draws its information from the internet to provide responses.

   As Google’s Bard is still in testing stage, a recent public fiasco made the tech giant lose US$100 billion off of its market cap on the Nasdaq exchange in the regular trading hours on February 8. At a recent event, the company posted a GIF of its new AI Bard in action, where the chatbot gave a factually inaccurate response to a question. In the GIF, the chatbot is asked, “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about? To which, the chatbot responded with a number of answers, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system, or exoplanets. This is where it went wrong, as the first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.

Comparison of ChatGPT and Bard

2. Baidu’s Ernie: Introduced in 2019 by Chinese tech giant Baidu, Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration (ERNIE) is a large AI-powered language model. According to the company, it is capable of performing tasks like language understanding, language generation and text-to-image generation.
3. Replika: This app based Chat GPT alternative combines GPT 3 model and scripted dialogue content. A user can simply download the application and chat on any topic like love, career, other interests etc. The app has the ability to mimic texting styles and even conduct video calls.
4. YouChat: The platform runs on OpenAI’s GPT 3 and offers similar capabilities as ChatGPT. It delivers knowledge of a search engine along with chatbot. YouChat gives accurate answers about current events and answers to questions even for the events before 2021, unlike ChatGPT.

Chatbot an efficient assistant?

With growing popularity of chatbots, the usage of similar services has expanded to a wide range of sectors of India. These include education, media and other service providers. Here we will discuss how this hyped up futuristic technology is expected to assist and improve the efficiency in various sectors:

1. Education: Technology like ChatGPT can help both students and teachers as it assists in various day-to-day tasks such as generating text on specific topic, writing articles, generate worksheets and quizzes, simplify explanation of complex topics to students along with generating class activities.
2. Media: Although ChatGPT cannot share individual opinions, it can still be of great use to media professionals and help them focus on actual journalism. ChatGPT can assist in various tasks like generating summaries of large texts and documents, generate research based questions, generating headlines, translating of articles in different languages, creating text for social media postings and much more.
3. E-commerce: Currently, ecommerce companies are using ChatGPT to enhance product descriptions for their website. It is also widely used to handle service inquiries like FAQs, order tracking and returns. Moreover, chatbots capacity to improve response times and providing support even in odd hours is a cherry on top for the industry.

Conclusion

With the launch of Microsoft’s ChatGPT and search engine Bing, experts are wondering if Google’s monopoly in search is to be on shaky grounds. Although Google has announced the launch of similar platform which is set to launch in upcoming months, the tech giants have kick-started a race to AI-based chatbots. Even though the technology is currently at its infancy it looks promising for a diversity of solutions. The launch of these technologies has triggered a debate on whether this technology will take-over the human intelligence? But the converse view is that this could only be a tool in the hands of humans to enhance their potential, just like other AI-based applications in the market. The recent Google Bard fiasco teaches us an important lesson – you should use your discretion and not be totally reliable on the information provided by AI-enabled technologies.