Chat GPT is owned and developed by the AI research and deployment company, OpenAI. According to Wikipedia “ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer[2]) is a chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of large language models and has been fine-tuned (an approach to transfer learning) using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.” Given my Computer Science, manufacturing and science background this definition is a bit simple but is good enough for our conversation.
Among my academic peers, there is a fear that ChatGPT will affect academic rigour as a net negative, however, I don’t quite see it that way. Many will recall when social media was in its infancy many were the deriding comments that some platforms were subjected to. Today, Social media is pretty much a part of our lives and is a core component of business elements such as Marketing.
Chat GPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) model which is capable of understanding and responding to human dialogue in a very sophisticated and speedy manner. You can also ask it many questions and create code, solutions and more. AI systems work by combining large sets of data and processing algorithms that are intelligent to learn from patterns and features in the data they analyze. The key word here is DATA!
The internet has become a behemoth of data. I often describe it as the biggest university and library in the world. For each industry area, the more data points the more data sets, and the more AI! An AI system runs a round of data processing, it tests and measures its own performance and develops additional expertise. Because language, literature, history and computing have some of the largest data points in this ‘global university’ many have reported satisfactory to excellent use of ChatGPT.
Engineering is quite another story, and our question is how deep does ChatGPT go with more obscure, tech-based and engineering subject areas? ChatGPT has demonstrated the capacity to provide ‘effective’ to correct definitions on engineering topics and perform some computations. GPT-based language models can assist in engineering-based text generation, early-stage design modelling, answering questions and generating reports. There is also the opportunity for bridging the language divide as engineers research solutions. This is a fascinating potential use as AI can extend the research points, where often it is limited by language.
Engineering is a very specific discipline and there is no room for error, yet AI models can find use in this critical field. Let’s see how it develops, but I think many will agree on this: whether we use ChapGPT or not, at least we can create more engineering data points and sets for tomorrow’s AI systems to consume.
- https://www.engineering.com/story/chatgpt-has-all-the-answers-but-not-always-the-right-ones
- https://newsmeter.in/tech-startups/chat-gpt-is-it-a-boon-or-bane-for-engineers-707641
- https://www.physicsforums.com/
- https://procomm.ieee.org/the-risks-and-benefits-of-chat-gpt/
