Numbers frequently tell a story, which is why the following is of such importance: It took two years for Twitter to get to one million users, roughly 10 months for Facebook, upwards of two and-a-half months for Spotify, a month for Instagram, and for OpenAI’s ChatGPT, all of five days following its launch in late November.
Those stats were referred to earlier this week at a press-only presentation broadcast live from the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit in Orlando, Fla. that discussed the question of whether AI-based content generation (Generative AI, aka Gen AI) tools such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard will help or hurt organizations.
Primary themes included: will they replace jobs, and how will they be integrated into the technologies that organizations use every day?
These offerings, Gartner noted, have generated significant hype with their potential to enable innovative and useful functionality, but there have also been many discussions around the problems such technology can create.
Speakers in the Q&A session were Frances Karamouzis, Gartner distinguished VP analyst and Svetlana Sicular, Gartner VP analyst, both of whom focus on issues related to AI and the enterprise.
According to the research firm, the ChatGPT service will “change rapidly during 2023, and will be complemented by other offerings. Gartner clients have asked a flurry of questions regarding ChatGPT. Their most frequently asked questions traverse areas as diverse as business value, workforce impact, ethical and legal concerns, technology, vendor landscapes, security and experiences.”
Karamouzis pointed out that the trajectory of making ChatGPT available to the masses is one reason it is in the spotlight, another is ease-of-use, and, last but not least, was the accessibility factor, in that “anybody can just go on and play around with it.”