It's undoubtedly the world’s most talked about technology right now, and its ability to ace exams, write screenplays, and even argue in court, has professionals from all walks fearing for their jobs.
As with many innovations, the uprising of ChatGPT, the popular artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot created by San Francisco-based research lab OpenAI, has sparked widespread concerns it could replace humans with its speed, accuracy and reliability.
But is the trending new tech a threat to treasury management – or could it be a possible ally?
“I don’t think ChatGPT at this point of time resembles singularity,” said treasury and technology expert Rahul Daswani FCT (pictured above) in his opening keynote speech at the ACT’s Middle East Technology and Innovation Forum.
“[ChatGPT] won’t be able to do what a human does. AI will just be a template for us to make life easier.”
Originally derived from mathematics, the term ‘singularity’ refers to a hypothetical future where a technology becomes so advanced that it transcends human control.
Daswani said treasurers should be less concerned about how the intelligent technology could cause dramatic disruption, and instead focus on how treasury can leverage AI to create templates that make internal workflows more efficient.
The conversational bot, trained using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), could work well for emails, automated reporting and particularly chatbots, he said.
“What will mostly likely happen in the short term is that you’ll be able to [set up] your treasury operating system and your own enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in a manner where you could have an AI application that provides template-based answers,” he explained.
“Then a human would have to [apply] some degree of judgement [and] analysis before it’s published.”
This is because although the ChatGPT model can answer follow-up questions, challenge incorrect premises, reject inappropriate requests and even admit its mistakes, the viral tool tends to produce “plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers” – a challenge Open AI acknowledges still needs fixing.
It’s also why Daswani said that, contrary to popular belief, the need for technology expertise won’t necessarily surpass demand for other roles.
“The need in the future is actually higher not for tech skills but business skills and soft skills,” Daswani said.
“AI can give you output, but how do you then figure out that the right output is communicated in the right manner. More soft skills will be needed, with the ability to collaborate, have empathy, understand relationships, understand what customer needs are, and sometimes we overlook that because we’re so focused on hard technical skills.”
Daswani added that the experimental technology is currently in its early stages and costs remain high as it is expensive to run.
“What people don’t recognise is that ChatGPT is actually using a neural network intelligence, and a neural network only functions if there is a humongous amount of computing power attached to it,” he said.
“There is a much higher cost to it [for now], although AI will continue to be incredibly relevant as we move forward. But it’s important to remember that some of these transformation journeys take 10 to 15 years. It’s not something that will happen tomorrow. Even though the change will be significant, it will be gradual sustainable change [that] will then fundamentally reshape the way we do things.”
Microsoft, which is an investor in OpenAI, is integrating ChatGPT into its Bing search engine to enable more complex and more natural searches and extract deeper meaning and better context from source material.
Google has also announced its rival artificial intelligence chatbot technology called Bard, and Tesla and Twitter chief Elon Musk has reportedly approached AI researchers about forming a new research lab to develop an alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
According to a UBS study, ChatGPT is estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users in January, only two months after launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history.
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report estimated in 2020 that while 85 million jobs may be displaced by AI and robotics by 2025, another 97 million jobs may emerge from these changes.
Megha Merani is a freelance business and technology journalist based in Dubai
The next ACT event in the region will be the ACT Middle East Treasury Summit, taking place in Dubai, 24-25 October.