Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems like ChatGPT, Google’s BERT, etc. are rapidly expanding. In recent months, ChatGPT has exploded as a fun and interesting tool that allows a user to have a very natural conversation with an AI chat bot.
OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT (as well as their visual creation tool Dalle) is incorporating a huge natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) model to generate new content. The new content aspect is why this is such a big deal. Today you can ask Google for a story, and it will search the internet and provide you a link of a story that another human has written, but if you ask ChatGPT for a story it will use these NLP and ML models to generate a new story that previously did not exist.
Last week one of OpenAI’s main investors, Microsoft, announced the integration of ChatGPT with their search engine: Bing. There were also announcements with deeper integrations with Microsoft's Edge browser, and Microsoft office (including outlook, word, excel, etc).
The low hanging fruit, and where I see the most immediate value is actually going to be in the smaller of the two announcements: the integration with Microsoft Office products. In my testing, I’ve found that ChatGPT excels in creating a starting off point for coming up with content. It can often get details wrong, so you have to do your due diligence to ensure accuracy, but it gives you something to react to instead of starting from a blank slate. Just imagine trying to write an email to your boss or a customer and being able to ask outlook for help creating a template instead of racking your brain on the best way to start.
The big announcement though was the integration with Bing. A lot of analysts and reporters are speculating that it is going to change how we conduct searches on the internet. I’m fairly skeptical at the negative impact this is going to have, especially given what I mentioned above on the sometimes inaccurate data that the NLP models can produce. It’s not hard to envision a scenario in which you ask Bing a question and it responds with a clear and concise answer, but a key fact is inaccurate or being sourced from an unreliable source.
In conclusion, the integration of ChatGPT and Microsoft products is really exciting and has the potential of having a huge impact on how we use the internet! However we have to keep in mind that these are just computer models being trained on the available data and should be met with a certain level of scrutiny before accepting it as truth.