First published: February 1, 2023

Republished: As retrieved from Web Archive

The Trend of Technological Revolution to the Rise of Chatbot Technology like ChatGPT

For centuries, humans have strived to find solutions to the numerous problems they encountered in society; problems ranging from security to limited resource supply and personal comforts. Often times, a certain discovery had always resulted in a revolutionary approach that would changed the human society forever.

We have learned about the stone age, the iron age, the bronze age and what have you. They were all periods of human transformational discovery that transitioned our society to irreversible eras of social and technical progress.

Since the second industrial revolution of the late 18th and early 19th century, human technical competition had truly revolutionized to what is this day known simply as technology, but it didn't end there.

The 1945 invention of Electronic Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC) took the world into a new technological era now known as The Information Age (also referred to as the Computer Age, Digital Age, Silicon Age, or New Media Age); a chronological era that began in the mid-20th century.

Through the advancement in modern day computer, we have seen the rise of several technological startups which are now giant companies such as the establishment of Microsoft and Apple computers in 1970s as well as the introduction of cell phones (firsthand held mobile phones) by Motorola. 1980s saw a double up in the computer age advancement with the introduction of PC by IBM, palm computers and smarter phones, the launch of Microsoft windows, as the long battle for the internet also came into fruition.

The 1990s saw a drastic increase in the feasibility of the internet, including the emergence of "blogs," the beginnings of e-commerce, and the founding of Google in 1998, which revolutionized the internet.

2000s would see a turnaround of the internet into a more interactive platforms, the social media. Besides the creation of online hosted resources like Wikipedia, Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004 at the Harvard University. YouTube, Twitter and other social media followed later. By 2006, the world already had over 90 million websites. Today, there are about 2 billion websites and 20-50 billion web pages. Only about 200-400 million of the websites are active, although the values differ across different sources.

The emergence of the blockchain technology in 2008, through Bitcoin, was another heat in the modern technological world. However, the disparities and setbacks in the world of cryptocurrencies makes the competition less interesting. Even so, cryptocurrency and the blockchain technology remains one of the most promising innovations to lookup to in the future of business and finance.

This day, Artificial Intelligence is becoming the subject of the competition in the technological race. Although the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already been part of human statement and technological application since 1950s, AI has seen a greater turnaround in recent years with the inventions of smart devices, advanced robotics, military hard wares and other inventions that are capable of carrying on a conversation and making autonomous decisions. These tools have been employed in different areas of human endeavors including personal and business applications like knowledge management.

Today, we are in a conversational AI age, a new era of technological revolution involving advanced Chatbots. The emergence of advanced AI chatbot systems like ChatGPT, developed by Open AI, is the headline of modern technological world.

What is Chatbot Technology

Chatbots are computer programs that simulate human conversation and are able to interact with people through text and voice. The programs are powered by Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, which enables Chatbots to understand and respond to human conversations and interact accordingly.

The Rise of Chatbot Technology

The world's first chatterbot program (a computer program designed to interact with people by mimicking human conversation) was created in 1966 at the Artificial Intelligence (AI) laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by Professor Joseph Weizenbaum.

This chatbot program was called ELIZA, and it could simulate human conversation with remarkable accuracy, providing replies that were just as effective as those of a real person. ELIZA achieved a wide range of tasks, among them functioning as a therapeutic agent through a conversational approach.

A great milestone in chatbot technology was achieved in 2001 when SmarterChild was launched. SmarterChild was an automated chat program that could be accessed through AOL Instant Messenger and Windows Live Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger). It was the first of its kind to be able to help people with everyday tasks, such as getting times for cinema, collecting sports scores, stock prices, news, and weather reports.

Smartchild (chatbot) was also the first to provide an AI-based conversational user interface. This marked a significant advancement in both machine intelligence and the way people interact with information systems.

In the aspect of chatbot-human interaction, WeChat successfully created a more advanced Chatbot in 2009 and began its application in 2011, revolutionizing the process of human-machine conversation (chatting).

In 2010, Apple developed and released Siri for iOS, a revolutionary AI bot that opened the door for other virtual assistants. Siri is an intelligent personal assistant and guide that utilizes a natural language user (NLU) interface to enable users to ask questions and interact through Messages.

The introduction of Siri ushered in a new era of advanced AI-based chatbot technologies, such as Google Assistant, released in 2016, and still widely used on mobile phones and other Google-based platforms. Amazon created its own chatbot, Alexa, while Microsoft developed Cortana. These techs can be used to communicate, set reminders, play games, access files and more, and is embedded in many Microsoft products.

Benefits of Chatbot Technology in Brief

The rise of chatbot technology has revolutionized how people interact with machines. The technology even at the initial rise has been applied across different fields of human endeavors, from classrooms to hospitals to business places.

Besides human-machine interaction, Chatbots can be used to automate mundane tasks and make communication more efficient. For instance, many businesses are using chatbots to automate customer service and sales processes, allowing them to respond quickly to customer inquiries, fulfill orders and carry out transactions.

The use of chatbots saves cost of having to employ a customer service representative to respond to your customers. Being a machine means that it can function 24/7 thereby increasing business engagement with customers and giving them the flexibility to make enquiry whenever they choose.

In fact, Chatbots have become a major part of the modern world. From customer service to entertainment, they are used in many different ways. But one of the most interesting breakthroughs in Chatbot Technology is the emergence of ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) for natural language generation.

Exploring ChatGPT: A Comprehensive Overview

ChatGPT is a chatbot launched on November 2022 by OpenAI, a research lab founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman and others in December, 2015 (wikipedia). ChatGPT is built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3 family of large language models and is fine-tuned with both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.

It is an artificial intelligence (AI) that uses natural language processing (NLP) to generate text from natural language input. It was developed in November 2022. ChatGPT is based on the same underlying technology as GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3), which is a powerful, large-scale language model that was developed in 2020.

ChatGPT defines itself simply as "a natural language processing (NLP) system that enables humans to have a conversation with a virtual agent."

Unlike other chatbots, ChatGPT provides a more natural conversation experience by leveraging natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language processing (NLP) to generate more human-like responses. The technology uses an advanced deep learning model to generate the most suitable response for a given query.

ChatGPT is trained on a large corpus of conversational data and can dynamically generate responses to new queries. This makes it more effective and reliable than other chatbots like GPT-3 that rely on predetermined sets of responses.

In other words, ChatGPT is different from GPT-3 in that it is specifically designed for conversation. This means that it can generate natural-sounding responses to user inputs in the form of conversations.

If you pose a query to a ChatGPT bot, for example, 

"What's the weather like today?", it could reply with "It's sunny and warm out there", unlike other Chatbots that would offer pre-programmed feedback with a machine intonation through an inputted prompt. ChatGPT is also able to generate longer and complete conversations, making it useful for almost any form of applications that requires user query response.

ChatGPT: Revolutionizing Technology and Initiating Competitions

ChatGPT has ushered in a new era of technological race, raising concerns among existing tech companies and other chatbot owners. By providing developers with a powerful, efficient, and reliable open-source conversational AI system, ChatGPT has an edge in taking over the modern technological world in a manner no one can imagine.

ChatGPT AI system is based on the latest in Natural Language processing (NLP) technology and has been designed to be easy to integrate into any existing product or service. It also provides a simple Application Programming Interphase (API) for developers to create custom conversational solutions, thereby paving the way for a new generation of conversational AI technology.

ChatGPT is being used by companies across the world to create smarter and more engaging customer experiences. As more companies begin to explore and adopt conversational AI technology, the race to develop the best solutions is on.

As a powerful tool that provides a more natural conversation interface than traditional customer service tool, ChatGPT, is a potential threat to many tech companies like Google. It is clear to all that as ChatGPT continues to develop and become more advanced, it could eventually become a serious competitor in the customer service space and transform the world of technology as we know it.

Many startups have risen to apply ChatGPT beyond what anyone would imagine. It is going to function in robolawyers, offering legal advice, and even represent humans in court of law. Medical and educational fields will not be left out. The many potential applications of ChatGPT shall be discussed in our future publications.

Recently, the management of Google, through its CEO, Sundar Pichai, raised a "code red" alarm amid the launch of ChatGPT as it is seen as a threat to the future of the company's search engine. Google, therefore has redirected some of its teams to focus on building out AI products that would be able to compete with the new age magic, "the ChatGPT".

In 2019 alone, Microsoft invested over $1bn (£808m) into Open AI company to enhance the development of ChatGPT. In January 2023, Microsoft again invested as much as $10 billion in OpenAI, still for ChatGPT research. Besides Microsoft, a lot of other tech companies and investors are already out there ready to fund the new technology. The fact that these huge sum are placed in for the ChatGPT is not just for investment sake, but because of the infinite potentials ChatGPT has in the future of human technological evolution.

Also, that Microsoft Azure is the cloud provider for OpenAI shows how much Microsoft and other tech giants are ready to invest to ensure that the dream of ChatGPT having an ubiquitous tech application come into effect.

The advantage Open AI has in its current pursuit is not only about the numerous investors ready to work with it, but the company was founded by great minds like Elon Musk, who have succeeded in most of his technological investments like Tesla, Neuralink, SpaceX, Starlink and others.

Conclusion

The full scope of what ChatGPT can accomplish is yet to be determined since it is still in its infancy, yet its current usage and many positive reviews demonstrate that it is the pinnacle of AI technology in our current society. Its introduction is already a technological wonder that has initiated a revolution among tech companies. Startups are working hard to apply the new AI into advancing their digital properties. Companies like Google have developed Bard, later renamed as Gemini AI. Meta too is investing heavily in generative AI such as IEPA. However, for the foreseeable future, attempting to create a top rival to ChatGPT will be an elusive goal but the race will not end until mankind establish a new AI trend to restart another tech contest.