During the 18th century, the earliest streetlights in colonial America were oil lamps burning whale oil from whales of the Atlantic and South Pacific oceans. Back then, whoever was in power believed that whale oil would never run out.
The Lamplighter was a person whose job was to light and maintain streetlamps, typically using a long pole with a hook on the end to light the wick of the lamp. The lamplighter would walk from lamp to lamp to light them, usually early in the evening, and extinguish them the following morning.
Gas lamps gradually started replacing oil streetlamps in the United States at the beginning of the 1800s, saving the whale population that were in danger of becoming on the verge of extinction. The use of gas lamps started in London, UK in 1807, and in the US in the city of Baltimore 10 years later.
The first public use of outdoor electrical lighting in the US was in Cleveland, Ohio in 1879. By 1893, New York City had 26,500 gas streetlights and only 1,500 electrical lights.
As technology progressed, street lighting began to shift from oil and gas lamps to electric lamps. This made the job of the lamplighter obsolete, as electric lamps could be controlled remotely and did not require someone to physically go and light them.
Electricity has changed so many aspects of our lives. Who can imagine life these days without electricity?
ChatGPT is a variation of GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), which is a transformer-based language model developed by OpenAI.
GPT was first introduced in 2018, and it quickly became one of the most popular and widely-used language models in natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as text generation, language translation, and language understanding.
In 2020, OpenAI released ChatGPT, which is an extension of GPT, specifically optimized for conversational language understanding. ChatGPT was used on a dataset of over 1.5 billion dialogues, which made it possible to learn the nuances and intricacies of conversational language, such as understanding context, handling follow-up questions, and providing relevant and appropriate responses.
This made ChatGPT suitable for a wide range of conversational AI applications, such as chatbots, virtual assistants, and language understanding for customer service automation. It is also a great source of content for marketing purposes.
All these things contributed to ChatGPT’s popularity, and explains why it is booming now.
Also, the release of GPT-3 (Third Generation of GPT), which is even more powerful and more capable than the previous versions, has made the process of creating state-of-the-art conversational systems even more accessible and affordable.
GPT-4 is rumored to be released soon by OpenAI. What a sensation!
ChatGPT is not just a hype or a buzzword — it is a real REVOLUTION that is here to stay.
More and more developers have already started building great apps on top of ChatGPT.
Apps like WebChatGPT or ChatGPT for Search Engines and ChatGPT Writer — all of these help the user to write and explore better and faster than ever before.
Don’t know how to use ChatGPT? Go to YouTube and type ‘ChatGPT Tutorial’.
Google was alarmed by the booming popularity of ChatGPT — and understandably so. My spouse, who is working on her research for an advanced degree, was instructed by the university not to use ChatGPT in her submissions.
Marketers are ambivalent when it comes to ChatGPT. On the one hand, this is an extremely powerful and (currently) free tool to create content. But on the other hand, some professions such as copywriters and SEO experts may become obsolete, as their services will no longer be required — just like the Lamplighters of the previous century.
One thing is for sure: we are on the verge of a new AI era. You can be either for or against ChatGPT, but you can’t ignore it.
Some of my copywriter friends would say: “But there is no soul in ChatGPT writing!” I would argue that it is just a matter of time until we won’t be able to distinguish between human writing and AI writing. Look up The Turing Test.
