Possible Applications of ChatGPT, and Their Bussiness Visions
Jan 1, 2023 posted by Franklin Ren
Coursework Assistant
Easiness of task: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Scope of business: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Room for start-ups: ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Whether you want to admit it or not, ChatGPT has overtaken Chegg and become students' favorite coursework assistant. Different from Chegg, answers from ChatGPT could be much more customized to specific questions and unfortunately harder to be detected by anti-cheating tools. After the release of ChatGPT, the web traffic of Chegg has experienced a plummet - maybe it will become the first company killed by ChatGPT.
However, does this field leave room for start-ups? Hardly. A clear reason is that ChatGPT has already satisfied the need for most coursework questions - and even if there are some new questions that were never there before, people could always move to Chegg. Any to-C start-up based on ChatGPT or other LLMs has to be able to provide a superior customer experience than what we currently have, and that could be very hard to achieve unless there is another tech breakthrough.
Grammar Correction
Easiness of task: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Scope of business: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Room for start-ups: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Another feature that students, and even some company employees would love. ChatGPT definitely has great potential to overtake Grammarly since its backbone is much more powerful. Certain easy-peasy features could be added to make the grammar correction process smoother.
Is there any room for start-ups? I will give it a two. Very likely OpenAI will be building its own grammar correction tool, but there are still slight chances that a wrapper of ChatGPT or some other LLM specially trained on grammar correction win. Keep in mind this could be a winner-takes-all application. Whoever wins, there will only be one survivor. Just imagine Grammarly, you rarely hear any of its competitors.
Business Document Generation
Easiness of task: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
Scope of business: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Room for start-ups: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Many of my friends have told me that they don't have to spend much time on writing business documents like meeting summaries, formal letters, etc., after the release of ChatGPT, and could focus on more important works. There is no doubt that ChatGPT will revolutionize the entire status quo of business document writing. However, we should not overestimate the room for start-ups in this area. Microsoft, the investor of OpenAI, could easily integrate the business document generation features to the Office 365 packages as a premium subscription. The only concern is privacy, where some companies might be reluctant to send their sensitive data to the document generator, but I believe a large company like Microsoft has its way of sorting this out - such as adding a separate server to process the private data.
K-12 Education Tool
Easiness of task: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Scope of business: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Room for start-ups: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
K-12 education tool is another possible application of ChatGPT, an interactive interface could be built between children and ChatGPT to teach them some basic knowledge, from an encyclopedia for kindergartens to a step-by-step tutor for middle school math problems. Compared with the previous ones, this area has much wider room for start-ups. Such an interactive interface takes great effort and much prior knowledge in K-12 education, which OpenAI does not have. Also, since K-12 education is a highly decentralized and customized area - it is unlikely that one company could monopolize and take the entire business in that field.
Foreign Language Translation
Easiness of task: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Scope of business: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Room for start-ups: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Are you tired of the word-by-word, incoherent, and unaffectionate translation by Google Translate? Now, ChatGPT could solve this problem. Just ask it to translate between languages it could generate an accurate paragraph which is much more fluent than Google Translate, and potentially better than real human translators. The scope of this business is without doubt, but it is not a great idea for start-ups since ChatGPT itself is already very good at it. One small room for start-ups is a hardware tool that could serve the purpose of simultaneous interpretation. Imagine a small smart pen that you could carry along with you during your travels to foreign countries. That would be pretty cool.
AI for Science
Easiness of task: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
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AI for science has been there for a while and ChatGPT could serve as a tool to generate novel ideas for experiments from existing knowledge and observations. This could be pretty helpful in cost reduction in industries like pharmaceutical, biological engineering, and mechanical engineering, where one experiment could take a great amount of money and time. Also, this could be a great field for start-ups since domain expertise knowledge is needed to bridge the gap between ChatGPT-generated solutions and real implementations - maybe only 1 in 10 ChatGPT solutions is useful. Anyone who has strong domain expertise knowledge in one of such science or engineering fields may find it worth giving it a try.
Business Analytics and Consulting
Easiness of task: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Scope of business: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Room for start-ups: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
Here comes one of the hardest tasks for ChatGPT, but if anyone could sort it out, it could be one of the best money-makers in our century. For the first time, we have some AI tools that can analyze financial statements, market trends, and customer behaviors case by case - works that traditionally require a group of top experts. However, to unlock the full capacity of ChatGPT in business analytics, there are several blockers that have to be overcome. First, the hallucination in ChatGPT is still an issue. While incorrect information & decisions from ChatGPT could be tolerable in to-C businesses like coursework assistant or business document generation, any mistake made in to-B businesses like consulting could be a total disaster for the company - because those fields require a high degree of accuracy and reliability. A small mistake could destroy the service provider's entire reputation and cause it to lose all its customers.
Besides, legal issues remain a problem regarding how AI could be responsible for poor financial, management, and marketing decisions. A third issue is privacy, large companies who own valuable business information are rather reluctant to give their data to AI tools like ChatGPT. For example, Bloomberg introduced its own GPT trained on its private financial data, instead of collaborating with OpenAI. Start-ups in this field might require rich experience, and most of them might end up becoming subsidiaries of companies like Bloomberg. One fortunate thing is, that since none of those companies would like to share their private data, it will be hard for one company to monopolize the entire business.
Coding
Easiness of task: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Scope of business: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Room for start-ups: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Coding is another such business. No doubt that ChatGPT would become a huge money maker if it could write code in place of the software engineers, but the high accuracy and reliability required by coding is making this task extremely hard. Microsoft's Copilot could assist some programmers in writing codes, but it is still not accurate enough to replace the programmers - it is merely an assistant at this stage, just like its name suggested. Much work needs to be done to reduce the degree of hallucination. For the room of start-ups, I am rather pessimistic since such services are too standard that one tool could solve the problem for most of the customers, so very likely there will be one winner that takes all - maybe Microsoft, maybe Google, since they have the most data and training resources.