Twenty years ago I wrote a series of articles in KMWorld on Search called “Automating Perception.” I interviewed the top people at the leading information retrieval vendors, and something has always stayed with me that Philippe Courtot, the CEO of Verity said to me. “When people do a search, they don’t want hits, they want answers!”
ChatGPT comes very close to that ideal, Philippe would have loved it. In the same sense I interviewed search leaders back then, I recently interviewed ChatGPT, as courteous and voluble an interlocutor as you would ever hope to meet. This article is (necessarily) edited for brevity.
My first question is, what does “ChatGPT” mean?
“ChatGPT” stands for “Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer.” “Generative” refers to the ability of the model to generate new text based on the input it receives. This is opposed to models that are only able to recognize or classify text such as OCR. “Pre-trained” on a large dataset of text before it is fine-tuned. “Transformer” is the architecture used, a type of neural network well-suited to data like text. So, ChatGPT is a pre-trained generative transformer-based model for natural language processing tasks such as text generation, summarization, question answering, and more.”
Ah-ha! Question answering, that’s what Mr. Courtot said users want, way back at the commercial beginning of Search.
Follow up question: is ChatGPT a form of NLP?
“Yes, ChatGPT is a form of Natural Language Processing (NLP). It uses NLP techniques to generate human-like text based on the input it receives.”
Next question: who made ChatGPT?
“ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI, led by Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman. The model was trained using a dataset of text gathered from the internet, including books, articles, and websites … estimated to be in the range of tens of billions to hundreds of billions of words.”
Cool, what are the top business use cases for ChatGPT:
“1. Customer Service: ChatGPT can be used to automate customer service interactions.
2. Content Creation: ChatGPT can be used to generate high-quality written content.
3. Lead Generation: ChatGPT can be used to engage with potential customers.
4. Business Intelligence: ChatGPT can be used to extract insights from unstructured data.
5. Language Translation: ChatGPT can be used to translate written text.”
In applications like Customer Service and Lead Generation, can people talk to ChatGPT and can you talk back to them?
“For speech input, you can use a speech-to-text (STT) service, which can convert spoken words into text that can be processed by a language model like me. Some popular STT services include Google Speech-to-Text, Amazon Transcribe, and Microsoft Azure Speech-to-Text. There are various text-to-speech (TTS) services available that can convert my generated text into speech. Some popular TTS services include Google Text-to-Speech, Amazon Polly, and Microsoft Azure Text-to-Speech. I can understand and generate text in multiple languages like Spanish, German, French, Italian, Chinese, and many more.”
Then, the question every sales rep selling a new technology hears – who is your competition?
“My competition includes other AI language models developed by companies like Google, Microsoft, and IBM, as well as more specialized models for specific applications. Microsoft has its own language model, called GPT-3, which is similar to ChatGPT. Microsoft has integrated GPT-3 into its Azure Cognitive Services. Amazon also has its own language model, called Amazon Transformer, which is available as part of Amazon SageMaker.”
Finally, the question that every customer most wants to ask, how much does it cost? ChatGPT answers like a good Sales Engineer should. I try to ask a very specific question on pricing: how much would it cost to license ChatGPT for customer service for 10,000 calls per day at five minutes per call?
“The cost of licensing ChatGPT for a specific use case, such as customer service, would depend on a variety of factors such as the number of calls per day, the length of each call, the specific features and capabilities required, and the length of the contract. Additionally, the cost would also depend on who is providing the license, as it could vary between vendors. Therefore it’s hard to give a specific price without more information about your requirements and the vendor you are interested in. In general, pricing for such services could be done on a subscription or pay-per-use basis, or even a combination of both.”
In Part 2 of our interview with ChatGPT, we will get a feel for its “personality”, test its knowledge, and see how it responds when wrong responses are questioned.
If you are interested in AI, you will have fun talking to ChatGPT at chat.openai.com/chat.
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