Made public in November 2022 and in just 5 days after launch, ChatGPT had already reached one million users during its research review phase, to become the fastest growing tech platform ever. The initial uptake and the capabilities showcased by ChatGPT were phenomenal to attract the right attention from investors in tech industry and one such is Microsoft. Currently, Microsoft is said to be in talks that will see an investment of $10billion in OpenAI bringing the value of OpenAI to $29billion. Now that’s what we call disruptive technology!

What is ChatGPT? If you are friends with a developer, you should probably by now know what ChatGPT is. Described as “scary good” by one of the giants in tech industry, Elon Musk, ChatGPT was developed by a team of researchers at OpenAI. OpenAI was founded by Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Sam Altman in 2015.  Based on the GPT-3.5 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 3.5) model, ChatGPT is an Optimizing Language Model for Dialogue. Put in simple terms, this is a sophisticated and creative chatbot that can be used for a wide range of applications (Analyzing sentiments, language translation, text generation, text summarization, etc), and is essential in providing answers to the smallest and biggest questions in life. Just ask ChatGPT a question and it will do its very best to respond, in the most natural, but highly intricate manner.

From ChatGPT’s impressive content creation, to data analysis and research, is the world moving closer to a full Artificial Intelligence takeover i.e. the extinction of human effort and redundancy of many jobs as a result of automation? Already seen as a threat in the education fraternity, it is reported that many schools in New York banned the use of ChatGPT. Many are citing concerns that students might end up being too dependent on AI-generated answers without acquiring the knowledge and skills they need.

What then are the future implications of ChatGPT’s adoption? How can one stay relevant in a world where digital innovation is moving at unimaginable speed? Many may be curious to test ChatGPT and thus it is important to check availability in your country since not all regions have access to the OpenAI API at the moment. However, if you do, and once you have obtained an API key, use the ChatGPT model by sending it a prompt in the form of a text string. The model will then generate a response based on the information it has been trained on.

“The next 5 years will be more disruptive than the last 15. This is not business as usual. A lot of technology that came in three years ago doesn’t work anymore.”

Saul Berman, IBM