It’s not very often that a new piece of technology genuinely makes me fall off my chair, and fires up a “gosh that’s sooo good” sense of child-like exhilaration and awe. Even less so does that happen in the field of AI (Artificial Intelligence) where so much has been promised and so little delivered that is of real help or value. So when I first logged into to have a play (https://chat.openai.com/auth/login ) I couldn’t believe what I was experiencing. This was without doubt the best thing I’d seen in a while.
So what is ChatGPT?
On the surface ChatGPT looks like a surprisingly ordinary Chatbot.
But there’s a reason that since it’s launch in late November 2022, ChatGPT gained over 1 million registered users in just 5 days, making it the fastest-growing tech platform ever. It has an incredible ability to interact in conversational dialogue form and provide human-like responses.
ChatGPT was created by a San Francisco company called OpenAI who have been at the forefront of AI research for a while. GPT stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer” and ChatGPT has been trained on the latest language model (GPT-3) which means it has been trained on ENORMOUS amounts of data – with 175 billion parameters trained on 570 gigabytes of text.
ChatGPT’s superpower is it’s ability to create content that is unbelievably “human”. But ChatGPT is a lot more than a chatbot.
Why is it so good?
ChatGPT is a remarkable step forward in making AI accessible to everyone. One of the main reasons it’s accessible is not just the volume of data it’s been trained on but also that it’s been trained in a different way, using supervised Learning, reinforcement learning, and to predict word sequences and use conversational context in unnervingly human like interactions.
While the core function of a chatbot is to mimic a human conversationalist, ChatGPT is also very versatile. For example, it has the ability to write fairy tales, debug computer programs, write student essays, and answer test questions. Elon Musk famously tweeted about ChatGPT that “It’s a new world. Goodbye homework!” (my son can neither confirm nor deny that ChatGPT is pretty good at homework questions).
What can it do for me?
There seem to be loads of things ChatGPT could do, and we are just scratching the surface of the things it could do, and the benefits it could apply to the HR community. As an example – try asking it about how trends and HR priorities have changed in the past five years, or what the benchmark salary is for an HR Director for an [X] sized company in a [Y] sector and [Z] location.
It will genuinely blow your mind.
It has also really thought about how it can be accessed and integrated from other systems via APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) – we are currently looking at how we can integrate it into our software suite to get it to write default job descriptions, vacancies, or anything requiring a 90% baseline description. It’s surprising how accurate its baseline human-like content can be – leaving you with time to edit and add value for your final 10% of personal genuinely human polish.
But for now I’m just happy to play with it and ask it to write me a poem:
