GPT is here to stay. Where will it take us?

Since its launch in late November, ChatGPT has captured the hearts and minds of people around the world for its ability to generate human-like responses. However, as with any new technology, there is often a gap between hype and reality. And generative AI, in particular, is quite the natural hype machine.

We understand the skepticism: great language models are great at sounding plausible, even when they're wrong. But to tell the truth, we are very optimistic. Over the past eight weeks, we've built AI-powered features and delivered them to 160 beta customers, and the feedback has been extremely promising. So much so that earlier this week, our Director of Machine Learning, Fergal Reid, and I released a special episode on the podcast to share our thoughts on what we've built and what we've learned.

This time we're going beyond Intercom, and even beyond customer service. In today's episode, we take a look at all things GPT: from skepticism to its role in corporate communications, from disrupting creative work to the future of user interfaces.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

It's not just the technology that is improving - we have a better understanding of what to build, how to customize and integrate it, and all of these dynamics are driving the industry forward. Perhaps the future of human-computer interfaces will be facilitated by personalized AI-powered bots that understand users' intentions and mediate their interactions. These models have unlocked many new abilities and fool someone at a glance, but they still lack the common sense reasoning needed to pass the Turing test. GPT can disrupt the customer service industry, but if automation increases agent productivity, it can ultimately unlock capabilities that improve their value to the business.

Make sure you don't miss any highlights by following Intercom on Product on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or by grabbing the RSS feed in the reader of your choice. The following is a slightly edited transcript of the episode.

Beyond the hype

Des Traynor: Hello and welcome to the Intercom Podcast. I'm joined, again, by Fergal, and we're going to talk about all things GPT. Fergal, it's been eight full weeks since the launch of ChatGPT. Already people have built useful products against it, and already we've had a wave of skeptics saying it's a toy, it's immature, it's never ready for anything, which doesn't is that classic reactions of new technologies. Where is your head? Is the skepticism justified? Have we crossed a perceptual cliff that really matters?

Fergal Reid: Yes, I think there is some legitimacy to skepticism. These things are almost natural hype machines. It's so easy to watch him and see him doing something that looks good. Unless you really dig into it, it looks wonderful. And then when you dig into it, you're like, "Ah, that's wrong, I feel misled." These machines are designed to generate plausible things, and if they are plausible, but evil is a problem for you, it can be very disappointing. So I understand the default stance of skepticism with which many people look to this technology.

"ChatGPT, as it is on the internet today, might be a toy, but that doesn't mean we can't take the underlying technology and create incredibly valuable business functionality from it"

However, we've always been very optimistic about generative AI, and since our last conversation, we've developed some features, shipped them to beta, we've had like 160 customers on our beta using those features: summary, some more experimental composer features to try to make people faster. And then we have a flurry of other features in prototype form that aren't quite there yet - high value stuff - but we think we're seeing a line of sight to that. And so, we understand the skepticism, we were optimistic, and now we have data - actual customer usage, real customers telling us that there's a particular job they want to do, that they're doing all day every day, and it's transformative for that. And that, to me, makes the position of skepticism start to look a little fragile.

Des: The fact that people use this object to do part of their day-to-day work.

Fergal: Yes. He's the ultimate arbiter of that. It's very hard to be skeptical when people...