Nearly three decades ago, when now ubiquitous accounting software Excel was launched, there were grave fears it would destroy jobs and wipe out the livelihoods of tens of thousands of bookkeepers whose trade it would replace. In a situation analogous to the one we now face with the recent launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT (chat generative pre-trained transformer) and various other artificial intelligence and machine-learning-based technologies, Excel was set to automate a whole cohort of jobs out of existence. And it did. But what happened next, and what tends to happen each time a wave of automation and efficiency sweeps through an industry, or indeed the economy, should be the lesson we take away, inspiring us to lean into this new technological revolution, experts say.
Complexica managing director Matthew Michalewicz said engines such as ChatGPT were a natural evolution of the search function. Three decades ago, he said, digging out complex information likely involved heading to your university library and trawling through the stacks until you found what you needed – a process taking many hours, if not a day or two. Search engines, most notably Google, up-ended this paradigm, and ChatGPT is the next step in this process.
Complexica in the past 18 months has raised $25m from investors including Perennial Partners and Microequities Asset Management, with the money being committed to rapidly growing the business.
“With Google there’s this massive acceleration of our ability to access knowledge, and when you look at what OpenAI has done it’s kind of the next level of that,’’ Mr Michalewicz said. "The next level up from what Google provides – a series of links – is conversational answers which are much more in-depth and contextual’, such as those that ChatGPT now offers."
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