OODA and the many members of the OODA network have been tracking the dramatic developments in natural language processing for many reasons, largely centered around the potential impact on government and business operations. Personally I have a firm belief that this domain will see such dramatic positive change that all of us should be preparing ourselves for what it means.
We wrote about major waypoints on the path to improved NLP in: What Leaders Need to Know About the State of Natural Language Processing (NLP). At the beginning of 2022 we put it this way:
Major improvements in the ability of computers to understand what humans write, say and search are being fielded. These improvements are significant, and will end up changing just about every industry in the world. But at this point they are getting little notice outside a narrow segment of experts.
Now a new AI enabled capability from OpenAI called ChatGPT has made it clear that the type of improvements were we talking about in that post are even closer to reality.
The ChatGPT tool is a large language model trained on a huge sample of text taken from the Internet. The interface is via chat so users can interact with it in a conversational way. Questions or requests are typed in a chat window and in seconds a response comes. The system can respond to requests to write code, write short stories or screen plays, write advice, describe technologies, teach complex subjects, give recommendations for problem solving and many other helpful tasks.
For the questions I have been asking ChatGPT, responses come back in a way that seem to have been written by a human. When questions are asked that are out of bounds or push the ChatGPT capability the response makes it clear that this is just a large language model trained over text with many limitations.
What does all this mean? We stick by our previous recommendations regarding what executives should know and do about NLP. See:
What Leaders Need to Know About the State of Natural Language Processing (NLP)
