OpenAI is a very beautiful thing and it has been a part of our daily lives for everything. If you are going to an office and you are writing emails every day, then what you are doing is you are using ChatGPT for refining your emails. Earlier you used to refine your emails by going to Grammarly and even before that you used to use the inbuilt words spellchecker. So the workflow is the same, it’s just the tools have been changed.
Search has been replaced by ChatGPT and therefore Google itself has the AI at the very top of the search bar. So in an essence the search bar has been killed. But that is very detrimental to Google because Google is essentially based on the ad business. And if you are not going to the links then you are not clicking on the ads and the Google is not earning from it. So essentially if everything is going to AI then that is going to be a huge monetization problem because AI is expensive.
The servers need to run 24x7 and you can ask very silly questions and because it is generating answers and not just pulling answers.
The main difference between the search and a ChatGPT answer is that ChatGPT is assimilating the information and giving you some kind of coherence. And the search is basically just giving you links, it’s just like find and just copy and paste the link and giving it to you. Search is a very much simpler process than what a ChatGPT search is. And ChatGPT is giving you the assimilation from the same 10 search results which you would end up eventually. But you are getting it in a one sentence.
Is it beneficial? Maybe, maybe not. But the question is if Google would eventually force you to just look at the AI result and just be happy about it, how are they going to end up making money because their ad business will plummet.
And the shifting from ad business to subscription business is a very challenging one because not many people want to pay for a service. And there will always be a free alternative, open source alternative. And even if the company sponsoring is happening and even if the ChatGPT is useful, unless it is something that everybody can do it because attention is something everybody has and can be given as a free and eventually you make money out of it. But to give the money upfront is a very identity shift. And it might work in America where the culture of subscription exists highly. But in other parts of the world, it is highly difficult to make a business out of it.
So the AI, the trend where it is going right now is a very challenging one. But the use cases of AI are very good. And all of the things which AI does right now was already possible, but not at the speed and the scale which was possible earlier.
Like for example, you can code on ChatGPT, but that was already available in the form of the various forums where many people have already written code and you just copy paste the code and just assimilate the things. Now that is done by ChatGPT.
For any consensus on a day-to-day activities, you need a consensus that was already there in the form of a Reddit thread and you can read the top comment and you get the gist of it. Now that is given by ChatGPT.
Whatever you can imagine was already being done, but the scale and speed at which it is done right now and also with the errors right now because there is very less input of you just put in a prompt and you expect an answer because of that, the answer might be wrong. And if you are not digging deep, then the answer is probably 100% wrong.
So that is the shift which we are seeing here is that the ChatGPT and the AIs of the world are making us even more lazy. And of course, there are many use cases for the speed and scale of it. But if we are not equipped itself to handle the situation or make the best use case out of it, then it’s just a surfer level use. And if you are only using it for surface level, you might as well use any other tool and that is fine. For example, if you are just using a ChatGPT right now in your office emails to just fix the grammar, you might as well use the Grammarly app and is one in the same things.
If you are not using ChatGPT to improve your email 10 times for a better conversion, better relationship, then what is the point? But many people will skip that because that’s how the collective change works.
The top 10% of the people earlier also used to the most use of the search engines. And now they will make the most use of the ChatGPTs and the AIs. But for the normal public, they will not go at the deeper level. And for them, it’s just another tool.
And maybe it has also become buzzword along with everything else because anything else which already existed has now a label of AI with it. Earlier it used to be that anything, the word which is catchy, for example, tech, innovation, new, anything and the companies would just label their products with that. Now you can get a fridge with AI, you can get a phone with AI, you can get a spectacle with AI.
But what is AI exactly doing it? Is it really helping things transform in a drastically different way or is just a minor upgradation from the previous thing? Or is it just the same use case for many people and they are just using the AI version of it because it’s only available in the market.
If I’m using a fitness app and earlier used to show me the steps, right now also it shows me the step but it has some AI feature enabled in it and it can talk to me. What good does it do to me? The input and output are both the same. It’s just that now I have something with AI.
So the speed at which the AI is growing is good. But the main change will happen from within and the gimmick has to stop. Not everything has to be labeled AI. Not everything has to be turned into AI for the features. And everyone who is just claiming that they are better now because they use AI features are also wrong. They just happen to use chat GPT. If you are doing a research, you can do the research on search and all chat on chat GPT there might be more hallucination. And if you’re not prompting it enough because you want it to be faster than the search engine, then you’d end up with the wrong information in the first place. In that case, a search engine might have a better decision.
If you are not capable enough of understanding the codes and if chat GPT gives you wrong code, it is very difficult to correct the code. So in that way, you might as well use the older methods of collaborations and go on. So, of course, there is this is not to say that chat GPT and the AI does not have merit. It has merit. But it cannot be that you can just dump your intelligence on the AI or chat GPT and expect it to make your life more better. It cannot happen. It is a tandem. It is a collaboration of sorts.
If you can collaborate with chat GPT and the AI, then only then it can benefit you and make your work, make your output 10 times better than it was earlier possible. But for that, you need to ask better questions. You need to also be intelligent. You need to understand the nuances and you need to know to ask better questions. Scrape through it also and also do your due diligence because without it is just all facade and it’s a gimmick in the end of the day.
So, yes, the chat GPT and AI adoption is at a huge scale. But if you analyze the use cases, many people are just using it at the surface level and they might continue using that because that’s what they want from the life. They don’t want to transform it to the level the chat GPT or AI is capable of.
So only 10 years from now, we can tell how chat GPT or AI has transformed the world. But for now, it just seems the business is pivoting and we are just getting conditioned to do things in a different way. But the input and output are mostly the same for the most people. And for the rest of us who are smart enough to take the most advantage out of the AI, they were already doing it before. Now, just they have the scale and the leverage. That’s it. Only 5% or 1% of people are winning earlier. Those same people are going to win now also, but with even more dollars at the end of the day. So that’s it.
And that’s the transition of AI for you. Hopefully, things turn out better for most people because unless that is just an elite game for a few.