This week, the world changed forever.

There are small things that shift all the time. But once in a while, there is a distinct fork in the road. A shift that – once made – charts a new course for the world.

I am, of course, talking about the release of ChatGPT – the unbelievably smart AI-powered chatbot unveiled by OpenAI on November 30th

I’ll get back to ChatGPT shortly. Firstly let me put it in the context of how we use AI today in the world.

Everyday use of Machine Learning

For years we have been talking about how AI will change everything. In many big and small ways, this has already been happening. Machine Learning enables computers to infer answers and insights from vast amounts of data. Machine learning algorithms are already at work figuring out which netflick to recommend to you. Which tweet to put in your timeline. Or which Instagram post or Youtube/TikTok video you need to see to keep you scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. Machine learning also helps Alexa understand what we are saying – even though we speak with all sorts of funny accents. And it helps Google Maps figure out how to get us most efficiently from point a to point b. Machine learning has made its mark in lots of subtle ways.

Perhaps the most common way of interacting with machine learning is through google. That uncanny feeling when it just knows what you are looking for, so much so that it finishes the sentence for you. And the elegance with which it helps point us to that paragraph on that page that just has the answer to the question that’s on your mind. But this pales in comparison to the power of ChatGPT.

A Copywriter at Your Fingertips

Imagine an AI algorithm that will write you a poem. Or a song. Or create a recipe. Or a block of computer code. Or a newspaper article. Or a movie script. Or a custom-built answer to pretty much any single question you can fathom. It’s like custom-written Wikipedia entries for every question in your mind – except you don’t have to scroll through the whole entry to find the answer to the specific question at hand.

The algorithm isn’t simply pointing you to a page on the internet it thinks best answers your question. It is creating genuinely new content to address the specific question you raise. You can play with it here.

So How Does it Work?

The purpose of GPT-3.5 (the algorithm that underpins ChatGPT, the GPT standing for Generative Pretrained Transformer) is to learn to write text that looks like it could have been written by a human. To do that, it has been trained on (i.e. “read”) texts with billions of words. This is basically the equivalent of gobbling up library after library with tens of thousands of books. A voracious reader indeed.

And the output is basically two things:

1. it has become so good at it that its writing is more or less indistinguishable from that of a human.
2. it has more “knowledge” readily available in its databank than any human ever could have

I use quotation marks around knowledge deliberately. The GPT-3.5 algorithm doesn’t have a sense of self or understanding the way humans do. It’s just an incredibly competent writer with an unfathomable amount of information at its fingertips.

What’s the Real Innovation Here?

Look, basically, ChatGPT is uber mega cool. Even really smart people are telling me that they can’t stop playing with it. Your very own, all-knowing bot, always at your fingertips (or at least never further away than your smartphone). These types of models have been available for some time, but this is the first time such a powerful bot has been freely available. The future arrived overnight. Boom!

But secondly, ChatGPT shows us the power of a natural language interface. You don’t need to know the arcane tricks of programming to make it do what you want. Or learn a complicated set of UI tricks to unlock its power. Just write what you want, and you will get it. While Google (+ StackOverflow) will be able to show you an article on how to solve a specific coding problem, ChatGPT will write the code for you, just prompted by a normal English language query. Double boom!

The World Will Never be the Same

I started out by saying that we woke up to a new world last week. Today, it’s hard to imagine a world without google and the instant access to information it gives us. ChatGPT feels like a similar step change, but it’s one that landed overnight (yes, clever researchers have been working on Transformers like GPT for years, but the powers were put into the hands of the public on the 30th of November).

Let’s start with education.

ChatGPT fundamentally changes the way education works.

Are you looking for an essay on Mao’s reforms – the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution? You got it. 1,200-word essay. Here you go. Not hard to see how this changes the nature of homework. But how about the other side of the equation? Could ChatGPT outline a relevant set of questions for students? And a grading rubric? And an example answer? And grading for an essay? And suggestions as to what could have been better? Yes – all of the above.

Education will never be the same.

So what about business?

The advances shown with ChatGPT open up whole new ways to do business.

AI-crafted, tailor-made letters for sales prospects? Automated replies to enquiries that actually have meaning? Transformation of customer service, corporate knowledge management, software development, accounting. The list is endless.

Now that OpenAi has shown the world the power of a language-driven interface, there is no going back.

As Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) wrote: “[…]you will be able to have helpful assistants that talk to you, answer questions, and give advice.” But this is just the beginning “Later, you can have something that goes off and does tasks for you. Eventually, you can have something that goes off and discovers new knowledge for you.” It completely changes the way we do business.

ChatGPT still has limitations. It’s deliberately not “connected to the internet”. The fine folks at OpenAI are at pains to stress that it is still just a “research release”. But they are not fooling us. This is a watershed moment in technology and in the advance of AI.

What an exciting time to be in technology.

What an exciting time to be alive!