Ah, Davos season is wrapping up, with the world's business and political elite having come together to heroically solve the world's most pressing problems eat steak and talk about climate change before flying home on private jets.
While this year's World Economic Forum (as it's formally called) has been weighed down by geopolitical risk and fractured allegiances, there's at least one thing uniting the world's wealthiest power players as they bounce around the Swiss resort town: A buzzy bot called ChatGPT, according to my colleague Julia Horowitz.
A quick primer: ChatGPT is a powerful, slightly scary artificial intelligence bot that can convincingly mimic human dialogue based on a prompt. Say you want a robot to tell you how to get into day trading, you can simply type "tell me how to start investing in stocks" into the platform and, voilá. If you want that information written in the form of a limmerick, ChatGPT can do that. If you want it iambic pentameter, or in the style of a pop song, just say so. It was released in November and has caused all manner of excitement and panic (especially among teachers)
For the productivity-obsessed jet set populating Davos this week, it's a game changer.
Jeff Maggioncalda, the CEO of online learning platform Coursera, said it's part of his daily routine. He uses it to craft speeches "in a friendly, upbeat, authoritative tone with mixed cadence," Julia reports. He even uses it to help break down big strategic questions — such as how Coursera should approach incorporating AI tools like ChatGPT into its platform.
"I use it as a writing assistant and as a thought partner," Maggioncalda said.
Christian Lanng, CEO of digital supply chain platform Tradeshift, said he's used the bot to write emails and claims no one has noticed the difference. He even had it perform some accounting work, a service for which Tradeshift currently employs an expensive professional services firm.
Look, the bot is cool in a dystopian-sci-fi-esque way. Is it perfect? No. It has plenty of flaws, and it can't write your Ph.D dissertation on gender roles in the novels of Jane Austen (though it might be able to convincingly pull off a high-school or undergrad-level essay on such a topic). It is neutral in an almost sociopathic way, lacking any sense of human empathy.
But the software, or similar programs from competitors, clearly is scratching an itch.
Microsoft, an investor in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced this week that the company's tools are now generally available to business clients in a package called Azure OpenAI Service. ChatGPT is being added soon.
"I see these technologies acting as a copilot, helping people do more with less," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told an audience in Davos this week.
Maggioncalda acknowledges the potential problems — the temptation to cheat, the software getting things wrong, the threat of inadvertently turning society into a bunch of dumdums who can't think their way through a simple memo. But the benefits of moving quickly through the administrative muck are hard to resist.
"Anybody who doesn't use this will shortly be at a severe disadvantage. Like, shortly. Like, very soon," Maggioncalda said. "I'm just thinking about my cognitive ability with this tool. Versus before, it's a lot higher, and my efficiency and productivity is way higher."
MY TWO CENTS
As someone who makes their living with writing — and who, more fundamentally, values the writing process itself as a mechanism for processing complex ideas — I'm at once fascinated and resisting the urge to clutch my pearls in horror.
Perhaps, one of these days, I'll ask ChatGPT to write Nightcap and see if y'all notice. But seeing as I have few other marketable skills, I'll stick with the old, super inefficient method of painstakingly pounding on my laptop until semi-publishable sentences form.
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