With technology moving at blazing speed after the COVID pandemic, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been seen as the next megatrend in the technology space, especially ChatGPT. Since its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT, captivated users with its human-like search answers that feel like a real conversation.
Will ChatGPT change the way we create content and search for answers on the internet?
In this blog article, we will learn more about ChatGPT and its potential in revolutionizing the way we work. In addition, we will also uncover why Microsoft invested in the creator of ChatGPT!
We have done a YT coverage on this topic. Watch the video below!
WHAT IS CHATGPT?
Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) is a generative AI language model that answers queries in a conversational way with human-like responses. It is developed by OpenAI, a research laboratory that is focussed on developing AI technology for the benefit of humanity.
ChatGPT can generate answers in words within seconds to a few minutes by typing any form of queries, such as requests to generate contents, software coding and even suggestions for trip itinerary!
In addition, it also supports multiple languages, but some languages may not be well-supported due to the complexity of interpreting the language’s context and also the existing availability of training data on the platform.
HOW DOES CHATGPT WORK?
One of ChatGPT’s main functions is to answer questions when being asked on the platform, just like search engines. However, it will search the answers from the database that it was set up with and provide information in a complete and yet sensible way, just like asking another human being.
Example of asking “What is ChatGPT?”
Other than providing answers for the questions asked, ChatGPT can also generate text-related contents such as articles, poems or product descriptions. In addition, it can also summarize a long, complicated article into a bite-sized, easily digestible text format for quick reading and easier understanding.
Nevertheless, ChatGPT can only provide data and facts for events that happened before 2021 as the technology was designed based on the database before 2021.
To make robots smarter and able to understand the emotional tone of text, ChatGPT is incorporated with sentiment analysis where it can show empathy and understanding when communicating with another sentient being.
In the past, we always wanted to speak to another human instead of using chatbots when using the customer helpline as chatbots only reply based on pre-programmed answers. This has caused a lot of upset and frustrations among customers when the answers provided may not meet the customer’s expectation and at certain times being inflexible and insensitive to the customer’s unhappy emotion.
As such, with sentiment analysis installed in AI chatbots, these chatbots are able to engage in chat conversations and generate text answers in a conversational manner, as if one is asking a question to another human fellow instead of a robot, making chatbots become smarter.
ChatGPT also supports multiple languages where it is able to translate the original text to the desired language as shown in the diagram below, where the original text was in Mandarin and translated into English.
Text Translation from Chinese to English
Besides generating answers in text, ChatGPT is capable to write software or create coding on the platform which surprised many people with its versatile capabilities as a generative AI.
WILL CHATGPT BE THE NEXT GLIMMERING BIG THING OF THE DECADE?
To determine if ChatGPT is going to be the next big thing of the decade, let’s look at how long does it take for ChatGPT to reach 1 million users when comparing against other social media platforms:
- Google – Less than 5 years
- Netflix – 3.5 years
- Twitter – 2 years
- Facebook – 10 months
- Instagram – 2.5 months
- ChatGPT – 5 days
As of 1 Feb 2023, ChatGPT has about 13 million unique users using its platform.
Based on the numbers above, we can see that more people are excited about ChatGPT and curious to find out how it can boost up their productivity at work, especially at creating content.
WHICH INDUSTRIES WILL BENEFIT FROM CHATGPT?
Potential industries that can benefit from ChatGPT includes:
- Customer Service – Provide fast & accurate support to improve customer experience
- E-commerce – Generate content for attractive product descriptions
- Education – Help students to learn new concepts and provide answers, like a personalized tutor
- Content creation – Create interesting articles, blogs within seconds
- Marketing & Advertising – Create content for advertisement & promotional ads
- Healthcare – Provide medical information to healthcare providers within a shorter time frame
- Finance – Provide financial information to financial professionals
As such, we can see that ChatGPT can not only provide answers like an ordinary search engine, but also help to boost productivity by creating contents and providing compiled answers in mere seconds, rather than spending tons of hours doing research to gather information.
PROS OF CHATGPT
Now, let’s also at the advantages of ChatGPT:
- Handle complex tasks better and more efficiently than humans which speeds up the work process.
- Create unique contents such as articles, songs and promotional ads with specific wordings in a few seconds.
- Perform a wide range of tasks for different applications, e.g. software coding, poems or trip itinerary planning.
- Supports multilinguals where it can ease translation for global organizations.
- Ease of use and accessible to a wide range of users where they can directly use the platform without requiring basic coding knowledge.
CONS OF CHATGPT
Other than looking at ChatGPT’s advantages, let’s also compare against its disadvantages:
- Copyright chaos – Even though ChatGPT is able to come up with unique contents, it may not have the ability to create truly original ideas as the contents were pulled and compiled from the existing database.
- Plagiarism – People may just copy & paste the content generated from ChatGPT platform which could be bad news for the academics.
- Biases & misinformation – One needs to check on the facts provided as the information is retrieved from the internet which sometimes may be incorrect.
- Unable to predict the future – The existing database only has content before 2021. ChatGPT has limited knowledge for events that happened after 2021 and is unable to provide the most updated information.
WHY DID MICROSOFT INVEST IN CHATGPT?
Due to the rising popularity of ChatGPT, it has also caught the attention of Microsoft where it was reported that Microsoft has invested about $10 billion into OpenAI.
Now the questions arised:
- Why did Microsoft invest in ChatGPT’s creator – OpenAI?
- How will ChatGPT increase Microsoft’s competitive edge against its competitors?
1. Why did Microsoft invest in ChatGPT’s creator – OpenAI?
To answer the first question, let’s look at what AI project Microsoft is currently undertaking.
1. Cortana – Microsoft software’s personal digital assistant, like IPhone’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa.
2. Microsoft Teams – AI collaboration platform for teams where AI can generate meeting transcript during a meeting and provide real-time translation for multilinguals participants
3. Microsoft Azure – AI cloud computing platform where users can run their applications such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or software as a service (SaaS) and store data through a global network of data centers.
4. Microsoft Research – Microsoft’s R&D team to develop the latest AI technologies.
From the list of AI projects that Microsoft is involved in, we can deduce that by investing in ChatGPT, it is able to help boost Microsoft’s AI R&D efforts as they can take advantage of the AI expertise from OpenAI.
In addition, by incorporating ChatGPT into Microsoft’s existing offerings, such as Cortana, search engine – Bing and Microsoft Teams, it may induce more people to use these platforms as it can boost their productivity at work.
This brings us to the second question that was raised earlier –
2. How will ChatGPT increase Microsoft’s competitive edge against its competitors?
Here, we will look at Microsoft’s revenue generation source to determine if investing in ChatGPT is able to boost up their sales.
In FY 2022, Microsoft has generated a total revenue of USD 198.27 billion from 3 different business segments:
Revenue for each segment:
Productivity and Business Processes – USD 63.3 billion (32%)
Intelligent Cloud – USD 75.3 billion (38%)
More Personal Computing – USD 59.7 billion(30%)
Although Microsoft has released news that they will install ChatGPT onto their search engine – Bing to enhance the search experience on the Bing platform, we observed that Bing only generated about 6% of the total revenue compared to other offerings, such as Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure from the pie chart.
Nevertheless, if ChatGPT was to incorporate into other Microsoft offerings – provide cloud-based AI services on Microsoft Azure and facilitate collaboration work on Microsoft teams, working professionals and enterprises may jump onboard in using these platforms to boost their work productivity!
In Feb 2023, OpenAI announced that they are launching a ChatGPT subscription plan for $20 per month to provide faster responses and priority access to new features and improvements on the ChatGPT platform.
Let’s make an assumption that there is an increase of traffic on the Bing platform after ChatGPT was incorporated due to the ease of searching information or generating contents.
Assuming 13 million daily unique users want to subscribe to ChatGPT plus, approximately $260 million revenue are generated for each month and $3.12 billion of revenue are generated for a year! That is a massive boost to revenue within a year!
CHATGPT's RIVAL
From the massive success and attention that ChatGPT has garnered since launching in Nov 2022, various technology companies, such as Google and Baidu are also jumping onto the generative AI technology bandwagon, publicizing that they are releasing similar products to rival ChatGPT.
We have also done a deep dive article on these 2 ChatGPT rivals. Click here to read more!
CONCLUSION
To conclude, AI has been around in our society for the past few years, easing our lives by automating certain mundane jobs to robots. However, ChatGPT may be the game changer in boosting our productivity work and efficiently assist one to look for answers online.
Hence, creating a frenzy among technology firms to scramble and release their own generative AI products and services. The company that is able to create a product that is well loved by the public will become the next big thing of the decade, just like Apple or Amazon!
As investors, we love to look for companies with promising growth potentials to invest and grow our money. However, to determine if a company is good and cheap, one needs to perform due diligence to “unearth” the promising deals.
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DISCLOSURE
The above article is for educational purposes only. Under no circumstances does any information provided in the article represent a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any stocks/asset. In no event shall ViA or any Author be liable to any viewers, guests or third party for any damages of any kind arising out of the use of any content shared here including, without limitation, use of such content outside of its intended purpose of investor education, and any investment losses, lost profits, lost opportunity, special, incidental, indirect, consequential or punitive damages resulting from such unintended use.
