In the early days, there was quite a bit of magical thinking around chatbots. Decision makers had grand visions. Platform vendors would capitalize on inflated expectations with smooth sales demos. And in-house teams with little or no experience were tasked with figuring out how to build bots using technology they had never used before: a recipe for disappointment.
Spot on. "Magical thinking" is far too à propos a phrase for the explosion of interest (obsession?) in ChatGPT. It's almost as if we didn't have enough humans in our lives to talk to. Granted, it's an incredible thing to have an algorithm generate what seem to be actual conversations. Part of it could be the functionally indistinguishable experience of texting with someone... it looks and works the same, because you're not there in person.
This hits it home for me in the piece: "It is all too human to overestimate the effects of technology in the short term and underestimate them in the long run."
The problem with excitement around a technology is people make tall claims and try predicting how it should evolve rather than wait and see how it evolvs. I am reminded of the WiMAX Vs Wifi, CMDA Vs GSM etc. Those questions have been very decisively answered. So are the other hardware form factors and so forth. I definitely agree we need to watch how GPT or other LLM technologies evolve in the coming years.
Spot on. "Magical thinking" is far too à propos a phrase for the explosion of interest (obsession?) in ChatGPT. It's almost as if we didn't have enough humans in our lives to talk to. Granted, it's an incredible thing to have an algorithm generate what seem to be actual conversations. Part of it could be the functionally indistinguishable experience of texting with someone... it looks and works the same, because you're not there in person.
This hits it home for me in the piece: "It is all too human to overestimate the effects of technology in the short term and underestimate them in the long run."
The problem with excitement around a technology is people make tall claims and try predicting how it should evolve rather than wait and see how it evolvs. I am reminded of the WiMAX Vs Wifi, CMDA Vs GSM etc. Those questions have been very decisively answered. So are the other hardware form factors and so forth. I definitely agree we need to watch how GPT or other LLM technologies evolve in the coming years.