When Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda first "started banging" on OpenAI's ChatGPT, he couldn't believe what he saw. "It looked like magic," he told Insider's Cadie Thompson at the 2023 World Economic Forum. The former English major turned ed-tech executive said that he was impressed by how the buzzy chatbot was able to "recombine word patterns" to "create new ideas." "The first time I sat down in front of ChatGPT, I said'this is not possible,'" Maggioncalda said. He called ChatGPT a "game changer" that is "blowing my mind" -- so much so that he now talks to ChatGPT daily and uses it as a "writing assistant" and a "blog partner." His interest in the AI extends beyond personal use.
Teachers and students will discover by June that learning "will never be the same again" as people are increasingly using the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, according to the chief executive of one of the world's largest providers of online education. ChatGPT is able to process large amounts of text and shares that information such as summarising it or explaining it "in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible … to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises and reject inappropriate requests", according to its creators, OpenAI. If asked, it can create essays, poems and coding. Source material can be provided by a user or the technology uses available resources from the internet.
ChatGPT, a cutting-edge language model developed by OpenAI, has been making waves in the tech and marketing industries for its ability to generate frameworks for recurring projects and tasks - and some are even using it as an extension of their executive team. "I ask ChatGPT to become aware of where my biases and blindspots might be, and the answers it gives are a really, really good starting point to check your thinking," Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera. In 2022, the adoption of AI maintained a stable pace, up 4 points from the previous year, as 35% of businesses reported utilizing AI in their operations. The increased accessibility of AI played a key role in this growth, making it simpler for companies to implement AI throughout their organization, according to IBM's Global AI Adoption Index. Businesses are turning to AI to automate tasks and cut costs, contributing to its widespread adoption.
Some early adopters are already experimenting with the generative AI program ChatGPT at the office. In seconds, consultants are conjuring decks and memos, marketers are cranking out fresh copy and software engineers are debugging code. Almost 30% of the nearly 4,500 professionals surveyed this month by Fishbowl, a social platform owned by employer review site Glassdoor, said that they've already used OpenAI's ChatGPT or another artificial intelligence program in their work. Respondents include employees at Amazon, Bank of America, JPMorgan, Google, Twitter and Meta. The chatbot uses generative AI to spit out human-like responses to prompts in seconds, but because it's been trained on information publicly available from the internet, books and Wikipedia, the answers aren't always accurate.
In the next five years, it is likely that AI will begin to reduce employment for college-educated workers. As the technology continues to advance, it will be able to perform tasks that were previously thought to require a high level of education and skill. This could lead to a displacement of workers in certain industries, as companies look to cut costs by automating processes. While it is difficult to predict the exact extent of this trend, it is clear that AI will have a significant impact on the job market for college-educated workers. It will be important for individuals to stay up to date on the latest developments in AI and to consider how their skills and expertise can be leveraged in a world where machines are increasingly able to perform many tasks.