Anyone can ask ChatGPT to answer a question or perform a task. But the popular chatbot is particularly useful for workers in three specific industries, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
“Coding is probably the single area from a productivity gain we’re most excited about today. It’s massively deployed and at scaled usage, at this point,” Altman said during a recent episode of “Unconfuse Me,” a podcast hosted by Bill Gates. “Healthcare and education are two things that are coming up that curve that we’re very excited about, too.”
Altman, whose company makes ChatGPT, made a point of noting that today’s AI systems “certainly can’t do [those] jobs” for you. But in those three fields, workers might benefit from using the chatbot as a productivity tool, he said.
Here’s how.
Coding
ChatGPT can help programmers finish their work as much as three times faster than usual, Altman said. The system can assist in tasks like reviewing written code for mistakes, writing test cases, answering a programmer’s questions and even generating new code completely on its own, he added.
The key word is “assist.” GPT-4, which OpenAI released last year, provides the wrong answer to programming questions nearly half of the time, according to a 2023 study from researchers at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley.
Coders who use ChatGPT to assist their work should proceed with caution and double-check everything the chatbot says — a process that may be faster than performing those tasks manually.
The goal isn’t just to help coders complete more work in less time, Altman said: Such a productivity shift can, and should, give people more free time to think outside of the box.
“They can — at that higher level of abstraction, using more of their brainpower — they can now think of totally different things,” he said. “It’s like [how] going from punch cards to higher level languages didn’t just let us program a little faster, it let us do these qualitatively new…
Read the full article here
