Curt Nickisch: In late 2022, people started talking about how ChatGPT was poised to change work as we know it. What is so special about this technology?
Ethan Mollick: ChatGPT-3, which is the base generation of this technology, was around for about a year, and it was okay. It worked at or near the level of a D-minus student. But we have since crossed a threshold of ability that has made ChatGPT incredibly useful. It can now achieve the output of a B-minus student. And if you use a more advanced model like the one on Microsoft’s Bing search engine, you can achieve the level of an A-minus student. This represents radical progress in a very short period of time.
We have some early results on how these tools affect productivity. One was a controlled experiment on people doing business writing, and the other looked at website coders. The results were amazing: In both cases the researchers found a 30 to 50 per cent improvement in productivity. And these were people who hadn’t even been trained on the system. Clearly, this is major. We have never seen productivity improvements like that. To provide some context, the productivity improvement we saw when the first American plant added steam power to its operations in the 1800s was about 25 per cent.
CN: What kind of opportunities does this open up for companies?
There is no rulebook or manual to work from, so you have to explore for opportunities yourself. As indicated, this AI is really good at writing computer code and common documents like memos or reports. If you need to write a letter of’s Five Forces Model.’ This type of request could save someone up to 12 hours of work and provide a document that they can build on — because as good as it is, you still have to check AI’s work.
