ChatGPT has become an overnight sensation, but the technical developments that enabled it took decades to emerge. In this article, I discuss what ChatGPT is, how it developed and executive strategies to navigate the opportunities.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a chatbot application that leverages a generative pretrained transformer (GPT), a deep-learning neural network model. The GPT is trained on vast amounts of data, such as internet content, and can generate human-like language in response to an input prompt by transforming an input sequence (a request or a question, for example) into an output sequence (the response or answer, respectively).

What technical developments made ChatGPT possible?

Neural networks have been around for over 60 years, but for decades, they were mostly used for small-scale “toy” problems. However, several technical breakthroughs in the past 20 years enabled the emergence of ChatGPT. These include:

1. Learning algorithms that can handle deep learning neural networks with many layers (previously, only one or two layers of connections could be accommodated, which limited the representational power of the models).
2. Paradigms for training and applying generative networks that can produce human-like language responses.
3. Models of attention for dealing with the complexity of natural utterances and images, for example.
4. Access to large amounts of data for training, such as the contents of the World Wide Web, a corpus of digital books and social media posts.
5. Access to enormous amounts of scalable computing resources for training.
6. Reinforcement learning methods that can be used to incorporate safety features into the models.
   
   

What are the business opportunities?

We can think of business opportunities presented by ChatGPT in terms of three categories. Read the full article here.

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