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For many people, ChatGPT appeared to come out of nowhere — a startling wake-up call to the potential opportunities and threats of artificial intelligence (AI). But Zsolt Katona, professor of marketing at California’s Berkeley Haas School of Business, was using a forerunner, GPT-2, as early as 2019, both to teach executives on the technology leadership programme about emerging tech and to write scripts for the videos that accompanied his course.
“It was a very tedious task to write scripts that I’d then read from a teleprompter,” recalls Katona. “I’ve never been good at writing nice-sounding text, either in English or my native Hungarian. But, even back then, the scripts generated were pretty good.”
Katona has little time for ChatGPT naysayers. “I love it. It’s a fantastic educational tool,” he says. “I remember what it was like in high school when there was no internet. Just like Google Search for a previous generation, ChatGPT will become how people access knowledge in this generation. It means we can be much more efficient in education, including executive education.”
ChatGPT has caused waves because it uses generative AI language models, enabling it to create new content based on the information it is provided in the form of text, images or audio. The quality of its output depends on the quality of the input it receives. Professor Christian Terwiesch at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School found that the chatbot was able to pass the final exam for his school’s MBA, scoring between B- and B on the Operations Management Course.
In his research paper, Terwiesch predicted ChatGPT’s “remarkable ability to automate some of the skills of highly compensated knowledge workers in general and specifically the knowledge workers in the jobs held by MBA graduates including analysts, managers and consultants”.
