Search for a Prompt Engineer

Disclaimer - This article is not written by ChatGPT. I will save you of that punchline.  

Serendipitously, me and this organization has worked on wonderful technologies over a long period of time. My first system was a UNIX and I had first learnt to type on a BBC Micro.  

These facts are not important, also it us not important that I have experience in geospatial mapping before Google was even registered as a company and we first deployed Microsoft Azure in 2012.  

When it came to building language model, we built and deployed one in late 2017, early 2018. It was fun and learning experience and for most part, profitable. We also learnt to automate with human control at the helm and on our platforms, we moderate content before it goes live. It also helps that we work in boring spaces. It is not glamorous, but it also does not make your job miserable. We get sufficient sleep.  

A colleague of mine who works in sales on one of our platforms, had started sending perfectly crafted emails to prospects. Too perfect if you ask me, and the use of ChatGPT was apparent. As an employer I could see rise in productivity as the communication teams did not have to vet the text no more.  

                                Up until the conversion dropped.  
                                Drastically. 

I realized that the recipient could sense it. I am not sure what it was, but our guy was not able to make the personal connect that is required to make a sale. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the text in the email and perhaps that was (is) a problem in itself.  

If everyone who is pitching a sale, is employing a common large language model, the differentiation is lost.  

A lot can be ascertained by how we say what we intend to say. And we all feel differently. To some optimism sounds like a sales pitch, and pessimism a smarter way of helping (and selling). 

Respect is a universal desire and personally speaking, ChatGPT failed to show that.  

Not that it was disrespectful. But what I concluded was that if we actively employed ChatGPT for sales and related communication, we would fail to differentiate ourselves effectively and lose competitive advantage. 

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A Data Scientist at Hashbrown asked ChatGPT for a recommendation on 'Continuous function for multiplier that gives small values in the center and large values at extreme points.' 

ChatGPT suggested us Sigmoid Function & Gaussian Function as an option, whereas the team required an exact replica of parabolic equation or a parabola  

Now where I sit, I do not either and as far as I can tell, not many of my readers do, but what ChatGPT did here was amazing and abortive. The suggestion was not incorrect but wasn't fit either.  

In both the cases. the presence of ChatGPT added something of value it seems, it suggested alternate paths that may or may not have worked.  

If you add this and all the cool stuff ChatGPT, it looks like a neat party trick, reminiscent of early days of Internet, and also it works, and who better to explain this than Stephan Wolform, as he does it here. 

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And as you might have heard or read, ChatGPT can pass the bar, but what about the spirit of the law. It may clear a medical exam, but will it be liable for a bad diagnosis. It is safe to say that for matters of life and death and perhaps sales as well, ChatGPT is a companion of sorts, and with further improvements and a good prompt engineer by your side, you may be able to enhance your output.  

Although it will not fish. Nor catch game to cook. Or till the land. It will however make a lot of bullshit jobs either redundant or convert them to those of a prompt engineer.  

But. 

ChatGPT works beautifully well where liability is close to zero.  
Education comes to mind.  

ChatGPT makes it convenient for guardians to help kids with homework. Fact checking, brushing up on known facts and theories. Formulae we might have forgotten.  

And no one usually dies if we bungle up between Fourier transform and Fourier Series.  

An electrician cannot ask ChatGPT, 'which wire to connect?' and live to tell the tale, 100% of the time. However, a student may do all the Watts, Hertz, and Ohms. 

And this is not trivial. This has immense financial and sociological benefits to kids who do not have active help at home, due to lack of finance to hire tutor, due to parents who did not go to school or are semi-literate or have classes with skewed student-teacher ratio.  

Schools or school boards should be able to build apps around the technology to aid their kids and free up teachers to create better courses, again with the aid of ChatGPT.  

It has the capability to be more one to one than any of the ed-tech platforms out there, ChatGPT would make for an efficient study partner, or a formidable homework solution provider.  

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It may not replace google as your default search engine option but as Satya Nedalla said, they will sure make Google dance. The search results from Bing were not much different from those from google for certain queries that I performed, and it was expected.  

But that also means I could use both Bing and Google and expect similar results and if I as a user do that, the advertiser shall do that as well and either reduce their ad spend on google or at least begin to diversify.  

ChatGPT does help. Will it replace the work force? No. But will make future hiring unnecessary for few departments. It will surely not replace journalists but can very well be a fair substitute for a PR team.  

We used ChatGPT to describe machines on one of our platforms and the results were not too dissimilar to our own indigenous language model. But now we are not using our model as ChatGPT is portable and extensible.  

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All said and done, AI is expensive. I had touched on this subject few years ago, The Business of Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence,  

and it is also slow to develop, a bit here on it - The Business of Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence 

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Is there a point to all this? Yes. Absolutely.  

ChatGPT and related AI will reduce the cost and access to quality education. The emphasis is on quality. The Ai makes a lot of errors but for an objective question, help in calculus, botany, or physical chemistry, it will help kids learn more, learn faster and learn better.  

ChatGPT is boon to the autodidact amongst us, and there is too much diversity and the more we grow, the more we learn about our limited knowledge and lack of depth. Instead of Google, ChatGPT is more likely the first point of contact to learn or discover something new, or fresh. And if and when citations and attribution arrive, it will only be better.  

Something that Neeva is doing already. 

ChatGPT has its uses, and in so far, they are few, but the technology is useful and the user of today is lot less luddite than the early days of internet. And that helps immensely with growth and adoption of this technology. 

Summary  

ChatGPT is a wonderful piece of technology and the first to be affected would be edtech companies, homework solution providers, and probably the PR department of newspapers. It can also help news and media organizations be more productive as well with editing and related tasks. It can also generate decent commercial content, mostly the content that is created for the purpose of just being content. 

Although I hold the opinion that ChatGPT will not create better writer. It will never be able to match Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, or Dostoevsky. May be Chetan Bhagat, I hope. 

Apart from that, I do not perceive any seminal shift or advancement happening in the next few months. it would be the usual grind from proof of concept to a final Product.