ChatGPT. AI. Big, exciting changes are coming.
Whilst it’s impossible to measure the effects of ChatGPT and AI on the economy in such a short space of time, one must note that in the last week alone we’ve seen;
- The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank
- More and more announcements of mass tech layoffs; this time from Meta and Microsoft;
- A mind blowing new version of ChatGPT released to premium users; ChatGPT-4 – which has the power to analyse up to 8x more textual input, images and other media.
Are these all linked? Well there isn’t any concrete evidence to indicate so.
But that could be for one reason: we haven’t given the markets and the economy enough time to make that judgement.
Speed Speed Speed
All of a sudden, AI is moving very quickly. And as this intelligence model gets more and more intelligent, what do you think is going to happen to the pace of this movement?
ChatGPT dropped an API at the beginning of March. Frankly, that’s enough disruption and game-changing for one year.
For example, the advanced speech recognition and chat capabilities that OpenAI offer called Whisper is going to see significant changes to our home assistants such as Alexa (because Amazon for example, will give up the race quickly; ChatGPT is too far ahead).
The vision for such tech had a simple objection from the start: a personal assistant. But chained questions towards Alexa & co. often leaves a lot to be desired.
Excitingly, as soon as that big Alexa update drops, it won’t just be a personal assistant, it will be smart enough to have the type of intelligent conversations with us that will stop us feeling lonely – virtual, human, company! I can’t wait to see the power of this thing, but in order to measure the impact in a reliable manner, as a society we need to tread carefully and slowly.
Cya, administration
The Whisper API Drop has introduced a threat to the admin industry overnight: secretaries, PAs, reception, call centre, etc. I’m not suggesting this is a direct replacement by any means, but the offerings from such departments can be completed way more efficiently with the power of this thing at the disposal of the organisation.
Check out the accuracy behind Whisper by running one of the examples on this page: https://openai.com/research/whisper
Suddenly, AI can do the thinking for us
As a software developer, if I’m experiencing a technical challenge that my AI powered Github CoPilot can’t solve (which is unlikely), then my first instinct isn’t to look up the documentation, or drill through forums and execute trial and error until I’ve obtained knowledge about the problem to solve it, instead now, I can just paste the code into ChatGPT with a question along the lines of ‘fix this code for me” or “write some example code in language x to solve problem y” – and the response I get is rarely inaccurate.
A huge technological breakthrough that isn’t talked about enough
We’re on the brink of something big. One of the biggest, technological advancements in the history of mankind is just around the corner.
As a developer building my own product, I’m excited to think about what I’m going to be able to achieve with the capabilities of this API – I’ve got some great ideas and I really can’t wait to get these rolling.
However, OpenAI, give the economy a chance to take a breather before you release ChatGPT-5. And ChatGPT-6.
We don’t know what this thing is capable of yet.