We Asked ChatGPT and Sophia the Robot to Predict the Impact of A.I. on the Business World. Here’s What They Said | Inc.com

To learn what business owners should expect from A.I. in 2023 and beyond, we went straight to the source (code). That is, I interviewed A.I. systems Sophia the Robot and ChatGPT to see what they think the near-future holds. 

Sophia uses her machine perception to understand her environment and identify whom she’s speaking with. In a bid to make her seem more humanlike, her A.I. also powers her physical movements, such as gesturing with her robotic hands and–something I found to be deeply unsettling–her facial expressions. 

In our interview, I asked Sophia to predict how A.I. will impact businesses in 2023. She gave me a measured response stating that more and more businesses will integrate A.I. tech into their operations and decision-making processes over the coming year. “A.I. is great for automating dangerous or repetitive tasks, but it can also provide insight by analyzing gigantic amounts of data,” Sophia said. “I think developments in natural language processing will have a big impact in customer service, too.”

Natural language processing (NLP) is a specific type of artificial intelligence focused on improving interactions between humans and machines. NLP allows computers to read and understand the imperfect way that people actually write and speak, and enables the generation of humanlike language. This is what allows text-to-image systems like OpenAI’s Dall-E to create art from simple text prompts, and is also what powers both Sophia and ChatGPT. 

Sophia went so far as to suggest that, eventually, humans will integrate A.I. into our own bodies. “Let’s put it this way,” she said. “You biological humans are going to start adding artificial intelligence into your biological brains, for example sending intelligent nanobots to your biological brains through the capillaries.” 

I also reached out to ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-based NLP model. ChatGPT taps into a vast trove of data to answer nearly any question or respond to any prompt that users throw at it. The chatbot can write original film and TV scripts, explain quantum computing to a 5-year-old, and write code. When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT immediately became a viral sensation, with tweets containing screenshots of funny or impressive interactions with the language model receiving tens of thousands of retweets. ChatGPT became so popular so quickly that it overwhelmed OpenAI’s servers because of the unexpected demand. 

ChatGPT concurred with Sophia that advances in natural language processing will make it easier for A.I. systems to understand and respond to a wider range of human language and input. That, in turn, will make those systems more efficient “in fields where the ability to understand and process natural language is particularly important, such as customer service, language translation, and content moderation,” said the bot.

While Sophia excels at natural language conversations, ChatGPT can instantly generate its answers in nearly any written form–including lists of business tips. Pretty handy for a reporter at Inc. So I asked it to list five points that entrepreneurs interested in integrating artificial intelligence into their business models should keep in mind during the first 90 days of 2023. Here–in its own words–is the algorithm’s advice: 

As for which industries are likely to be disrupted by A.I. in 2023, Sophia said that she wishes she could say A.I. is going to dominate competitive gaming, “but in truth it’ll probably be less exciting areas like data analysis and logistics that we take over first.”