The world is abuzz with the murmurs of ChatGPT! And not without reason. The free chatbot can generate an answer to almost any question asked. Its popularity can be gauged from the fact that since its launch in November 2022, over a million people signed up to use it in just five days!

So, the verdict has been passed: It is the best AI chatbot ever. Regardless of whether the verdict is true, starry-eyed fans are constantly posting comments and photos of the chatbot producing college-level essays, computer code, songs, and even half-decent jokes!

Besides, this generative AI tool is significantly solving very real industry challenges that essentially fall under two categories: Efficiency and Effectiveness.

ChatGPT: The Efficiency Challenge Solved

This means creating just enough of the output you’re trying to produce at a decent price point. These are problems of scale and every function in a company deals with one or the other version of these.

There’s much discussion around ChatGPT creating opportunities for marketing teams to create websites, ads, emails, content marketing assets, and social campaigns more efficiently. But a point to note here is that a company’s content generation needs don’t stop with marketing. 

ChatGPT Is More Than Just a Marketing Tool

Investor relations teams need presentations and quarterly reports. Product teams need technical documentation, product descriptions, and disclaimers. And legal and compliance teams need regulatory reports.

Generative AI that is dedicated to healthcare can help doctors update records more efficiently. It can even identify new molecules or treatment options. 

ChatGPT: The Effectiveness Challenge Solved

Effectiveness means producing an output that’s better than what you need/desire. While efficiency aims for quantity, effectiveness’ main theme is quality.

As an example, blasting more email marketing messages can be counterproductive if they don’t meet the customer’s needs in the first place. This practice tends to produce brand fatigue–the customer starts seeing a brand’s messages as white noise.

Here, brands would achieve a greater impact by focusing on effectiveness instead of efficiency.

Other Industry Aspects Where ChatGPT’s Effectiveness Is a Gamechanger

Effective customer service builds brand loyalty. Effective investor relations messages attract stockholders. Effective talent recruitment increases the recruiter’s ability to attract new high-performing employees.

This effectiveness is also greatly applicable to innovation. Taking the healthcare example again, efficiency doesn’t guarantee effectiveness. So though there might be loads of new ideas that actually work, these won’t necessarily improve health outcomes!

Meanwhile, coming up with more effective ideas may produce more (and better) treatment options more quickly. It could even mean fewer failed medical experiments.

The Gist: Efficiency Is Important, Effectiveness is Transformative

The Big ChatGPT’s Debate: What’s More In Store?

ChatGPT is already solving efficiency problems–quickly generating loads of content. And GPT-3, which is commercially available at a low cost, is a big-time efficiency tool. And it is trained to be useful instead of specialized. 

But soon, the high-end functionality available through the GPT-3 API won’t be good enough. That’s because it is too BASIC to reliably address nuanced or more specific problems. 

But the good news is that its arc of evolution is bending towards effectiveness. So, businesses looking for a competitive edge can, in time, leverage the tool to change the way they operate.

With time, the ChatGPT algorithm will develop more advanced capabilities in the form of either problem-centric, specialized models trained on real-world data or fine-tuned models. It has the potential to become a knowledge base containing insights or deliver problem-centric prompts that can produce effective outputs at scale. 

For businesses tapping into this evolution, this will be a win-win situation: they can increase business impact while achieving economies of scale.

How ChatGPT Has Changed the Way We Do Research

As a rule, people use search engines that suggest them possible answers to their questions or provide resources to enhance their knowledge. 

But ChatGPT and search engines have two entirely different goals. A search engine’s goal is to direct you to accurate resources. However, ChatGPT’s primary goal is to generate reasonable responses to inputs using natural language. 

Note that ChatGPT’s main goal does not include accuracy. Though it is a secondary goal, it isn’t a guarantee.

Having said that, there is certainly some overlap. Part of ChatGPT’s primary goal includes collating a useful response from a wide range of data sources. So, essentially, ChatGPT provides answers in a conversational way while simplifying searches and allowing for dialog.

So, thanks to ChatGPT, instead of hunting for the one search result that relates most to your topic, opening the link, finding the information you want, and often not finding it good enough and trying again, you can use the AI tool to get a clear and valuable answer in much less time. 

Besides, there’s practically no end to how far you can go to find the best (most convincing) answer through ChatGPT. If you want, you can also dive deeper into a specific part of its response. All you have to do is request a more elaborate answer for that interesting part.

Final Note

As far as ChatGPT is concerned, the genie is surely not going back into the bottle. And this forward march of technology will never cease or come to a halt. 

So, it is best to ask ourselves, “What new systems can be built with these new tools?” And then do our bit to make the world a better place.