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What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT has been a trending topic since its launch in November 2022. Whether you’ve read op-eds from professors warning about the potential of students using the service to write their essays for them, or LinkedIn posts from executives hypothesizing that chatbots will replace human jobs, the technology has sparked the largest conversation about an AI product to date.

Who Created ChatGPT?

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Creators | Evolution | Purpose | Limitations | Business Uses | Alternatives | Future

ChatGPT is a general-purpose artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI. The chatbot can translate text, write code, generate articles and blog posts, and even write poems. It is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of large language models and has been fine-tuned using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. It’s also the most advanced AI Chatbot accessible to the general public. OpenAI is the artificial intelligence research organization behind the chatbot prototype. The organization was created by a group of co-founders in 2015 and is now led by CEO Sam Altman and a team of researchers and engineers. 

When you ask ChatGPT what OpenAI does, the following response is generated:

ChatGPT Conversation

This is an exciting moment for AI researchers. Public interest, digital literacy, and access to conversational technologies is at an all time high. Fortune 500 companies have also taken note. In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI to support the development of advanced AI technologies. This year, Microsoft announced the third phase of the companies’ long-term partnership—a multi-year, multibillion dollar investment to accelerate AI breakthroughs to ensure these benefits are broadly shared with the world. 

Additionally, Microsoft announced that it is building AI technology based on the same foundation as ChatGPT into Microsoft Bing, Edge, Microsoft 365, and other products. The partnership is focused on supercomputing at scale and new AI-powered experiences. As OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider, Azure will power all OpenAI workloads across research, products and API services. As of today, however, OpenAI is an independently owned company.

The Evolution of Conversational AI

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Creators | Evolution | Purpose | Limitations | Business Uses | Alternatives | Future

While consumers may be familiar with chatbots on most company’s websites, ChatGPT has created a whole new playing field. 

The primary goal of any website chat feature is to give visitors something to interact with when they land on your website. Still, it’s important to point out the differences between website chat powered by Artificial Intelligence versus a rules-based chatbot.

Rules-based chatbots can be used for FAQs but knocked off course by an unfamiliar input, the technology requires a human-in-the-loop to determine the next action. AI, on the other hand, autonomously understands the incoming messages and responds appropriately thanks to Natural Language Processing. This means dialogue feels more real and authentic than a chatbot.

Conversational AI and Conversation Automation are incredibly valuable to consumers and businesses for the simple reason that these technologies automate business-critical communications. 

The evolution from chatbot scripts to autonomous, human-like communication represents the strides made with this Conversational AI in a matter of years. 

What is ChatGPT For?

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Creators | Evolution | Purpose | Limitations | Business Uses | Alternatives | Future

On its homepage, ChatGPT showcases a few uses for the chatbot like “Explain quantum computing in simple terms,” “Got any ideas for a 10-year-old’s birthday?,” and ‘How do I make an HTTP request in Javascript?” to demonstrate the breadth and depth of the chatbot’s knowledge. As for its capabilities, ChatGPT highlights the tool’s ability to remember what the user said in earlier conversations, the ability for users to provide follow-up corrections, and that the chatbot has been trained to decline inappropriate requests. 

ChatGPT is a variant of the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) model.

This model is built using deep learning techniques that allow it to process and analyze vast amounts of text data. 

The training process for ChatGPT involves feeding it with massive amounts of text data from various sources, such as books, articles, and websites. 

The model then learns to identify patterns and relationships in the data, such as word associations and sentence structures. This process is called pre-training, as the model is being prepared to perform a specific task. Responses are generated by predicting the most likely sequence of words that would follow your input based on its training data.

ChatGPT is currently available through desktop web browsers and has not released an official app yet. It’s free to use, and after signing up for an account you can start interacting with the chatbot immediately. The user interface is simple and features a text box for the user to enter a query, and a corresponding results page that generates the text in real time.

In March 2023, OpenAI launched GPT-4, its next-generation large language model, for a subscription fee. After generating buzz with its free ChatGPT bot, OpenAI launched a premium model using GPT-4 for $20/month. While the free version of ChatGPT is still available, the new model using GPT-4 technology has upgraded features. 

ChatGPT-4 can respond to images, even providing recipe suggestions from photos of ingredients, for example, or writing captions and descriptions. It can also process up to 25,000 words, about eight times as many as ChatGPT. 

Premium members with access to ChatGPT+ are able to access this version of ChatGPT, and those accessing the free version of ChatGPT are using the GPT-3 model. 

In fact, because the version available to the public isn’t trained in news or events after September 2021, you’ll get the following response when you inquire about the chatbot’s latest iteration: 

Limitations of ChatGPT

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Creators | Evolution | Purpose | Limitations | Business Uses | Alternatives | Future

2023 is the year of experience, and chatbots are front and center in the race to deliver against rising customer expectations. With the hype around new Natural Language Generation models like ChatGPT, all eyes are on chat. In the face of next-gen AI-powered chat capabilities, scripted & predefined exchanges won’t cut it anymore. This is because they fail to meet the minimum experience requirements to turn interest into revenue. 

There are limitations to ChatGPT’s technology that enterprises need to consider. The three listed limitations on the homepage are:

  • – May occasionally generate incorrect information
  • – May occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content
  • – Limited knowledge of world and events after 2021

Intelligent chatbots are rapidly evolving. As advanced as its GPT-3 technology is, however, ChatGPT lacks in several departments. For instance, ChatGPT doesn’t have the contextual training to understand nuanced language, emotions, or to interpret humor or idioms. Sarcasm is a no-go. 

The chatbot does not provide sources for its answers and is trained on a large set of text data — data that may contain biases or prejudices. It cannot provide insights or produce expression, only words. The chat experience will improve the more people use the technology, but as of today, GPT-3 falls short at producing human-like conversations or analysis.

As GPT-4 technology becomes more accessible to the general public, OpenAI has noted that this language model also has its blindspots. The company notes that the latest iteration of the chatbot is not without its inaccuracies and biases, stating that ChatGPT is  “less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios.”

ChatGPT for Business

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Creators | Evolution | Purpose | Limitations | Business Uses | Alternatives | Future

While the applications of GPT technology are impressive, in order for businesses to leverage the full power of Conversational AI, the tech needs to be integrated into a full wraparound solution that includes enterprise-ready governance, trainable, on-brand messaging, and autonomous actions that drive business goals. 

It’s important to remember that ChatGPT, as a product, is still in its infancy. The bot still generates headlines for confidently reporting factually incorrect information or data “that was entirely made up,” a bizarre phenomenon called hallucination by A.I. researchers. 

The arms race to capitalize on Conversational AI has escalated with Microsoft launching the new Bing and Google soft-launching its own AI-fueled bot Bard. However, even Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai stated in a company-wide memo about the launch of Bard, “Things will go wrong. But the user feedback is critical to improving the product and the underlying technology.”

To leverage GPT technology to drive results for business, companies need a solution that uses a concert of language models, not just GPT. 

Alternatives to ChatGPT

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Creators | Evolution | Purpose | Limitations | Business Uses | Alternatives| Future

With ChatGPT & Generative AI solutions creating buzz, businesses need their solutions to drive the desired business outcome and, equally as important, be equipped with guardrails to minimize risk.

So how can ChatGPT be leveraged for business in an effective and safe way? Users can integrate the code into their own apps or technology stack through OpenAI’s API to automate repetitive tasks, handle administrative workflows, analyze trends, etc. 

To power Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success teams, however, several language models need to be combined in order to deploy a digital member of your team. By combining multiple models with diverse training data and architectures, the overall system can become less susceptible to specific biases, leading to more balanced and accurate responses. 

Unfortunately, reducing bias and improving accuracy is not just a case of throwing a bunch of language models into the mix. These models need to be carefully selected and combined in a way that effectively balances their strengths and weaknesses. Enter Conversica Revenue Digital Assistants.

The data our models are trained on must be carefully curated to minimize potential biases. This means getting as close to a “golden dataset” as possible. In short, it means having the cleanest, most validated dataset possible. 

As an example, you could use an optimal combination of language models, but if your dataset were scraped from Quora and Reddit, your AI’s responses would be skewed, at best. Ask Conversica’s AI team how important source data is, and you will quickly understand the scale and complexity of the task.

Machine learning fueled by our unique combination of intellectual property and state-of-the-art Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Natural Language Generation (NLG), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the special sauce that makes our AI-powered Revenue Digital Assistants deliver human-like, two-way conversations that understand incoming messages, respond appropriately and take proper action to help you delight customers and generate revenue. The GPT technology ensures the webchat experience endears a visitor to your brand and empowers continued engagement by an RDA on multiple channels across the customer journey.

ChatGPT and its core underlying technology, GPT, have been a part of our research and development long before the ChatGPT demo launch. GPT-3 is one of several language models used in our Generative AI solution. Using multiple models enables Conversica to deliver the conversational experience to Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success teams while allowing for a range of governance that enterprise brands require. 

Our RDAs are intelligent enough to understand context and take the next best action; whether that’s answering a question, elevating a hot lead or assisting an existing customer. We’re proud that our RDAs can respond to just about any question a visitor asks through the power of AI and both NLU & NLG capabilities and are resilient enough to respond to off-topic questions that often derail an AI-powered conversation. They are also trained on the clients dataset and can respond consistently to questions about your brand.

Conversica began working with GPT technologies in early 2020, shortly after OpenAI’s release of GPT-2 with 774 million trainable parameters. Today OpenAI’s GPT-3 has 175 Billion trainable parameters and is a core part of our AI automation suite that drives Conversica’s New Generation Revenue Digital Assistants™. See our NLU & NLG in action.

Future of ChatGPT

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Creators | Evolution | Purpose | Limitations | Business Uses | Alternatives | Future

Large language models like GPT are being integrated into all kinds of products, which will likely mean changes in work for many industries. This will require a paradigm shift for revenue teams and a new strategic model. 

We call this the Growth Workforce model. By offloading routine and time-consuming (albeit essential) conversations to an RDA, employees can focus on high-value tasks. This means:

This isn’t just another tool in your proverbial toolbox. This is a strategic model that empowers employees and prioritizes personalized communications with customers/prospects. And it’s all powered by Conversica’s Powerfully Human®️ Conversational AI platform.

ChatGPT has opened many consumers’ minds about the power and practicality of AI solutions. It’s important to remember that language models are evolving in real time, and something we pride ourselves on is staying up to date with the latest models to identify the best and most relevant ones to add to our mix, so you don’t have to worry about it. 

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