If you were living under a rock for the past several weeks, you missed the internet buzz around ChatGPT from OpenAI. ChatGPT is an incredible AI chatbot with some of the most advanced conversational capabilities ever, with the ability to generate human-like responses. My excitement around this came after I used it to help me get started on a few tasks like writing blog posts, sending an uncomfortable email, and writing some mundane code that I didn’t have the energy to write. Guess what? It’s a badass.
Check it out here: https://chat.openai.com/
Chatbots Saved me from Support Insanity (A COVID Response Story)
During the initial response to COVID-19, the company I was with had to roll out work from home to 1500 people who needed to learn how to work from home. On average, we had about 20 people working from home. Data center and network scaling aside, we needed to get people help faster. To respond to the challenge, my director of development and I set up a chatbot on Twilio overnight. The first release could respond to the top 10 questions that were being asked of our service team. Each night we would retrain the model and redeploy it with new features. My favorite features were the joke features that I added without the dev team knowing! It reduced demand on our team by more than 50%. It worked amazingly.
Our challenge in the end was time and needing more data. Today, I have so many lessons learned from a rapid rollout. ChatGPT could have helped solve many problems with interactions that we had to code manually.
How is ChatGPT different from other chatbots?
ChatGPT is a different animal than the one I used in my Twilio story. One of the main differences is the use of a transformer-based language generation model, which allows it to generate human-like text and engage in natural, conversational interactions with users. ChatGPT can also “remember” previous inputs and responses. This enables it to have a more natural and conversational flow, as it can reference previous statements and incorporate them into its responses. This makes it particularly well-suited for tasks such as customer support, where it can use previous inputs to understand the context of a conversation better and provide more relevant and helpful responses.
How does ChatGPT work?
ChatGPT is a variant of the popular language generation model GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) that has been specifically designed for use in chatbots. It works by taking in a sequence of input text and generating a response based on that input. It uses this training to learn the patterns and structures of language, allowing it to generate human-like text. In the case of the demo of ChatGPT, it was trained with 175 billion parameters.
To generate text with ChatGPT, you first input a prompt or series of prompts to which the model will respond. This could be a question, a statement, or any other type of text, and the model then uses this input to generate a response.
ChatGPT uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and deep learning models to generate its human-like experience. Deep learning models use neural networks with “layers” to make decisions, and the reference to “deep” is simply that the model has many complex layers. NLP is a field of AI that looks at human-computer interaction. Several techniques and approaches are used in NLP, which involve relationships between words and concepts, understanding meaning, and generating language.
So it’s perfect?
As a generalized conversational tech, it’s excellent. Likely it’s the best in the market today. For specialized tasks, it would need to be retrained with specialized data. It’s also not Generalized AI. Its not intelligence so much as it’s able to replicate what it’s seen from learning patterns from data loaded into it (see my other posts on AI). Rather than write more, I just asked ChatGPT to tell me its limitations:
It’s not perfect, but it is a badass.
Wait…who wrote this?
Some of this article was staged by ChatGPT. Yep. If you were struggling with the value of ChatGPT and why the internet is buzzing, then you just experienced it. An article takes me 4-8 hours to research, write, and validate. It takes longer if I’m doing code examples or posting audio/video. ChatGPT helped me complete this article in about 2 hours. I still had to edit, change, and rearrange, but talk about a cure for writer’s block! Use caution, though. You shouldn’t just use it blind to write letters, documents, emails, and articles for you, but it can be a great help!
References
Open AI - https://openai.com/