Is #OpenAI really a “once in a lifetime’s” opportunity for us all? Or is it just more marketing BS and hype?

9 min readDec 7, 2022

You might not have heard about OpenAI.

If not, then believe you me — you will do. In fact, you will do.

Right now. Lol.

As this blog is all about the future of work. And if you work in the knowledge sectors — then artificial intelligence is going to be a part of your future. As:

“Professors, programmers and journalists could all be out of a job in just a few years, after the latest chatbot from the Elon Musk-founded OpenAI foundation stunned onlookers with its writing ability, proficiency at complex tasks, and ease of use.”

The system, called ChatGPT, is the latest evolution of the GPT family of text-generating AIs.

IT GREW BIG FAST.

ChatGPT also benefited from a huge social media outpouring of affection for it. And so it went viral and reached 1 million users in just 5 days. For context, here’s how long it took other products to reach 1 million users:

Netflix — 41 months
Twitter — 24 months
Facebook — 10 months
Instagram — 2.5 months
OpenAI — 5 days

So where has this new Chatbot come from? Two years ago, the team’s previous AI, GPT3, was able to generate an opinion piece for the Guardian. And was something I talked about on the BBC. BUT ChatGPT has significantly increased its capabilities from those dark days..

GPT-3, also known as Generative Pretrained Transformer 3. Was a state-of-the-art language processing model developed by OpenAI. With 175 billion parameters, it WAS the largest and most powerful language model to date.

GPT-3 has (as it is still here) the ability to generate human-like text. Allowing it to perform a wide range of language tasks. From translation and summarization to text completion and even question answering. Its impressive capabilities led many experts in the field of artificial intelligence to hail it as a major breakthrough in the development of AI.

HAVEN’T WE BEEN SPEAKING ABOUT THIS FOR YEARS?

My own tedxtalk talks about GPT3 and shows off some examples of what it can do. And hints at the implications for the future of work. But even I didn’t realise the power of the new OpenAI machine. Which is now totally open to the public.

And I am not alone with being impressed by what it can do . Over a million people have been playing with it so far and it’s not even been a week since it launched.

Even Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla (and a frequent mention in my newsletters) is liking how his investment is doing. In a recent tweet, Musk referred to GPT-3 as

“an impressive achievement in AI research”

And he said that it could potentially be used to develop advanced AI systems for tasks such as autonomous driving. And natural language processing. Musk co-founded the startup with other Silicon Valley investors. Including technology venture capitalist Sam Altman in late 2015, saying that the research centre would:

“advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity”

According to a blog post at the time. But the Twitter CEO has since left the board and distanced himself from the company. However, another expert, Andrew Ng, the co-founder of Google Brain and former head of Baidu AI Group, has praised GPT-3, calling it

“an important milestone in the development of AI.”

Ng believes that GPT-3’s ability to generate human-like text could be used to improve the accuracy of natural language processing systems. And make them more effective at understanding and responding to human speech.

Bob Johnson, an AI expert and consultant, also praises GPT-3, saying that it sets a new standard for AI performance.

He believes that its ability to generate high-quality text has the potential to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of natural language processing systems in a wide range of industries.

Whilst the man that the developer who created Gmail. Has predicted that Google is only a year or two from “total disruption” . After the release of GPT 3.5 — the ChatGPT. As he tweeted:

“Google may be only a year or two away from total disruption. AI will eliminate the search engine result page, which is where they make most of their money. Even if they catch up on AI, they can’t fully deploy it without destroying the most valuable part of their business!”

Leading some online website to announce that:

“‘Google is done’: [As the] world’s most powerful AI chatbot offers human-like alternative to search engines”

As OpenAI’s latest artificial intelligence bot ChatGPT can be used as an amazing search engine. But with so much more in the way of the ability to create as it can also write TV scripts and explain complex theories.

THIS IS TECHNICALLY GPT — 3.5 (RIGHT-RIGHT?)

ChatGPT, is a fine-tuned version of GPT-3.5 that’s essentially trained on a blend of text and code published prior to Q4 2021. With a better UX and interface. Like GPT-3 and other text-generating AI, GPT-3.5 learned the relationships between sentences, words and parts of words by ingesting huge amounts of content from the web. Including hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia entries, social media posts and news articles.

Rather than release the fully trained GPT-3.5. OpenAI used it to create several systems fine-tuned for specific tasks. Each available through the OpenAI API.

One — text-davinci-003 — can handle more complex instructions than models built on GPT-3. According to the lab, and is measurably better at both long-form and “high-quality” writing.

Which this blog is an example of.

It would be interesting to see how YourFLOCK (www.YourFLOCK.co.uk) could potentially use some of the technology. In the future, we might be able to integrate GPT-3 into our employee retention platform.

Allowing us to offer our customers advanced natural language processing capabilities for managerial tasks. Creating a chatbot based on values to help keep your employees happy at work. And using text generation in places like Slack. Our own thoughts on AI — are still in development.

AS ALL THAT GLITTERS IS NOT GOLD:

Despite its impressive capabilities, GPT-3 is not without its limitations. Some critics have pointed out that the model is not capable of truly “understanding” language in the same way that a human does. And that it can sometimes produce results that are nonsensical or irrelevant.

But also because GPT-3.5 merely relies on statistical regularities in its training data rather than a human-like understanding of the world, it’s still prone to, in Leike’s words,

“mak[ing] stuff up a bunch.”

(Again I point to some of this newsletter…. Is Bob Johnston real? )

And as reported in TechCrunch:

“It also has limited knowledge of the world after 2021 because its training data is more sparse after that year. And the model’s safeguards against toxic output can be circumvented.”

But surely one of these issues is rather easily resolved with time…

SO SHOULD WE GET EXCITED?

Overall, GPT-3 represents a major advance in the field of artificial intelligence. And has the potential to revolutionise a wide range of industries. And thus the future of work for many millions of people. As more and more researchers and developers begin to explore its capabilities. The world of work can expect to see even more impressive applications of this powerful language processing model in the near future.

As Martin Harbech, LinkedIn ‘Top Voice’ in Technology & Innovation points out that with “Generative AI.” We can start to imagine a very different future.

“Imagine a not-too-distant future when all types of content creation are radically simplified and largely automated.
Imagine when all types of digital production — from writing, design, and art to movies, advertising, and engineering — are reduced to a *fraction* of the cost and will require far less human effort.
Imagine scientific research free to accelerate exponentially.
The topic of generative AI isn’t new… but the future just became a little bit clearer in the past week.”

You can also use the new ChatGPT for a huge array of new things. One of the most interesting examples I have seen is what Michelle Huang did. As the 26-year-old New York-based artist fed entries from her diaries, which she started at the age of seven, to produce text that is virtually indistinguishable from that of a human.

“With her daily journal entries containing everything from secrets and fears, to the “giddiness” of talking to a crush, Huang says she was able to accurately simulate what it would be like to talk to her childhood self.”

Which is rather amazing isn’t it?

As this is one of the most exciting aspects of chatGPT. Is its potential for personalization. Because the model is constantly learning from the data it receives. It has the ability to adapt to individual users and provide a unique experience for each person.

So it can not only create a blog in your style. Or a sitcom idea in the style of Seinfeld. But learn what you like and don’t like in a diet and create recipes for you. Based on your personalised dietary needs — like Alex Cohen famously did. Which is worth looking up.

NOT IMPRESSED BY IT YET?

That’s ok. I don’t need you to be.

But believe you me — this WILL be part of the future of work for most people.

Especially if you work in coding or marketing or technology. As the world of work for them is about to be part of a revolution — that they should have all seen coming…

As Zain Kahn the thought leader with over 263 thousand followers on twitter rightly said:

“AI is going to permanently change how marketing works.
If you’re not paying attention, you’re going to be out of a job pretty soon.”

Heck it made all the images in this newsletter. From me just writing one sentence.

(Apart from the famous Star Wars one)

Which might be the THING that humans can do better than AI.

Make us laugh and love something…

WHAT YOU THINK OF OPEN AI SO FAR — DO COMMENT BELOW.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Keynote, trainer and now TedxTalk speaker. Expert / guest on national TV and on radio and podcasts. Dan Sodergren talks about:

The Future Of Work
Technology
Digital Marketing

And has done for almost 20 years. Training 100’s of companies in digital transformation. Find out more about him on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Medium. And about the most recent company he co-founded called Your FLOCK.

ABOUT YOUR FLOCK

Your FLOCK improves your marketing agency’s employee retention by gathering and analysing data based on your employees personalised values and feedback.

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