What can ChatGPT do for your data team?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has long been considered the stuff of dreams, a “pie-in-the-sky” concept that always seemed more at home in science fiction than in our everyday reality. Yet, as we stand in 2023, AI is the driving force behind many of the technological advancements we have taken for granted in recent years. 

While we are yet to have a sentient AI take over the world like the movies (thankfully!) AI plays a major role in many popular smart devices. Smart assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, for example, use conversational AI to navigate and search for information or inform their users of products and services.

The concept of navigation has been a key component of AI from the very beginning. In fact, the concept of navigation was the main theme behind ‘Theseus,’ the world’s first AI system and the earliest example of machine learning at work. Built in the 1950s by mathematician and Bell Labs researcher Claude Shannon, Theseus was a robotic mouse that used machine learning and telephone relay switches to remember its path and navigate a maze’s metal walls.

While navigation is still a big part of machine learning and AI, one of the most promising and interesting developments in the field of AI comes in the form of a natural language processing chatbot known as ChatGPT. Over the course of this article, we’ll be discussing what makes ChatGPT special and analyzing how businesses can use ChatGPT to improve their data analytics.

The technology behind ChatGPT

Before we begin delving into what the AI chatbot ChatGPT does, it’s a good idea to get an understanding of the technology behind it. ChatGPT is a Chat-based Generative Pre-trained Transformer. As the name suggests, the product is powered by generative AI and can “chat” with a user to generate new content. 

Unlike conversational AI, which we commonly see in smart devices, generative AI can take existing information and create new and original content from this information in the same way that a human would. Simply put, generative AI is a leap forward for AI technology and machine learning in general, getting our AI models closer to the science fiction future we envisioned.

A brief history of ChatGPT

ChatGPT was developed by the San Francisco-based AI research and development company OpenAI in 2015. Co-founded by Elon Musk, as well as Sam Altman (former president of the startup accelerator  Y Combinator), OpenAI also has support from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, including PayPal founder Peter Thiel, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and investors such as Microsoft. 

ChatGPT is the latest evolution of OpenAI’s generative AI-based software. In addition to ChatGPT, OpenAI has also begun work on GPT-4 (a platform that is said to be far more extensive than ChatGPT) as well as producing the controversial text-to-imagery AI art generation tool DALL.E.

ChatGPT has been growing in popularity in recent months following some videos showcasing its abilities that went viral all over social media back in late November 2022. For those who missed the social media frenzy, ChatGPT is a potentially revolutionary next-generation chatbot that is capable of answering questions with seemingly well-researched and almost human-like responses at an alarmingly fast rate. 

Described by the UK newspaper ‘The Times’ as a “stunningly lifelike conversational language system,” ChatGPT is powered using a combination of generative AI, machine learning, and reinforcement learning from human feedback. Crucially, the platform also uses an offline database and moderation API to ensure that the chatbot does not learn from users with malicious purposes. While the offline database means that it has limited knowledge of events after 2021 (the cut-off point before the project was publicly released), the offline database allows it to avoid producing abhorrent responses that have plagued other AI chatbots in the past. 

Why Generative AI could revolutionize business

So now that we have explained what ChatGPT is, let’s focus on why it, and generative AI in general, could revolutionize businesses. 

Generative AI has already transformed the Customer Service sector in particular, with practically every service company having its very own dedicated virtual assistant to guide and support customers. The advancements shown by ChatGPT, and in particular, the in-development GPT-4, would allow for virtual assistants to be even more beneficial to customers by providing more detailed and accurate responses to customer queries. 

As highlighted previously, ChatGPT can write content faster than any human could. In theory, this means that companies could use ChatGPT to increase their written output while reducing their costs. 

At present, content produced by ChatGPT has limitations due to the offline database. Still, a future version with an online/live database could allow companies to use AI to produce up-to-date and accurate content. Businesses could then choose to employ humans as editors (as opposed to writers) to oversee the AI and ensure that the content produced is suitable for the business. 

How ChatGPT can support your data team

While ChatGPT and generative AI have the potential to fundamentally change the way customer service and content teams operate, the technology can also be used to support a business’s IT & data teams as well.

One of the lesser-discussed benefits of ChatGPT is its ability to debug code, which can dramatically expedite the debugging process. 

The debugging stage of software development is typically a time-consuming task that (depending on the coding language and knowledge of the developer) takes, on average, 25% of a developer’s time – this amounts to more than a full working day per week spent debugging!

Rather than going through code on a line-by-line basis, developers can put their code into ChatGPT and ask the program to check for bugs. Once the code has been entered, the AI will quickly skim through and identify any errors or potential vulnerabilities in the code. 

In addition, programmers using the tool can ask the AI to write code. Then, the code generated can be used to teach fledgling programmers a new coding language, giving them more confidence to write future code themselves.

CTOs, therefore, can use ChatGPT in their development cycle to make their dev teams more efficient, which in turn will help the business to save costs.

One of the most overlooked features of ChatGPT is its ability to explain the context behind the content it generates. By providing the reasoning behind an answer and showcasing how the program came to that response, ChatGPT can be used as a learning tool for businesses, giving users more understanding of specific terminology that they might be unfamiliar with. 

Using ChatGPT to dig deeper into your data

Data analysts can also use ChatGPT to ask meaningful questions about their data. For example, ChatGPT can be used to write SQL queries and identify particular data from a specific time period. Astrato generates human-readable SQL that allows data analysts of all skill levels to be able to understand the data presented to them. We believe that any person in any company should be able to understand the query created. This, in turn, will help to establish a culture of accessibility and collaboration around data within your organization.

At Astrato, we are committed to our goal of promoting easy-to-adopt data analytics and making it accessible to everyone. Whether you’re a data scientist at the top of your field or a newcomer to the world of data analytics, Astrato’s platform is intuitive for experts and data novices alike. 

By pairing Astrato with ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, you can continue to lower the barrier to data analytics entry. A lower knowledge barrier will enable a wider range of individuals – who aren’t necessarily experts in data analytics – to gain a greater understanding of (and involvement in!) various other key areas of your business.

If you’re looking to bring your data to life, then look no further than Astrato. Book your demo today and discover how you can revolutionize your business with no coding skills necessary.

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