Tag Archives: ChatGPT

AI Hype Begins

It didn’t take long after the widespread introduction of AI into the business environment for a carrier to claim it is using AI better than the competition. Masha Abarinova wrote an article in Fierce Networks that quotes Comcast as saying it is using AI more effectively than its fiber competitors.

The article covers a discussion with Elad Nafshi, the chief network officer for Comcast, who brags on the ways Comcast is already using AI more effectively than fiber-based ISPs. She quotes Nashi as claiming that Comcast has embedded AI that is “literally feet away from a customer” with real-time pattern detection capabilities that give Comcast the ability to pinpoint interference in the network.

I can already anticipate the fiber ISP retort to this claim, with fiber ISPs saying they don’t need a last-foot AI capability because fiber doesn’t have any interference since it has the same quality of service from end-to-end in the network.

I’ve been waiting for this first shot across the bow and suspect that Comcast’s claim will set off a chain of industry players claiming their flavor of AI is better than the competition. These claims are mostly hype and are aimed at Wall Street analysts and not at the general public. The biggest companies in the industry never miss a chance to claim they have an advantage. It’s easy at this early stage of AI to make this kind of claim since nobody can tell how much of such a claim is hype versus reality. Throw around enough buzzwords, and nobody can challenge such a claim.

A more interesting observation in the article quotes Nafshi as saying that general AI use among customers has not resulted in increased network traffic. He noted that while customers are using ChatGPT and OpenAI, the interactions between customers and the clouds are mostly passing text, which is not data intensive.

This differs a lot from what other industry players have been claiming about the future of AI. The article cites AT&T’s prediction that its network traffic will double by 2028 due to AI. Zayo cited an expected huge growth in network traffic as the justification to buy the fiber networks from Crown Castle.

I’ve been scratching my head for several months trying to figure out how AI might create the predicted explosive growth. I’ve yet to see anybody describe the specific AI traffic or functions that could double the traffic for a company like AT&T.

Network traffic is growing for other reasons. Ericsson recently predicted a 16% annual growth in cellular traffic. Numerous predictions for home and business broadband have predicted growth rates of 10-12% annually. Something drastic and new would be needed to double overall traffic on AT&T by 2028.

AI and Telecom Jobs

I’ve seen a lot of articles recently predicting that artificial intelligence will bring about a massive upheaval in the U.S. job market. Such predictions are not new, but the recent introduction of ChatGPT and other language models has elicited a new round of predictions. We already know that software can displace people. In 2019, Wells Fargo predicted that efficient software would replace 200,000 jobs in the banking industry. Much of this has already come to pass as software has replaced a lot of bond traders and behind-the-scenes analysts at banks. The question I’ve been pondering today is how artificial software will impact the telecom industry.

This industry has seen major retooling over the years. My first industry job was as an RF technician, and almost every function I tackled in the early 70s has been replaced by software. There is great software today that can pop out a propagation study or quickly estimate the link budget for a wireless connection. Similar changes have happened across most jobs in the industry. Folks proficient in copper technologies have been nearly phased out. There is no longer an army of certified Cisco techs working in every network engineering office. Rooms full of draftspeople have been replaced by fiber network design software.

Many of the past changes to industry jobs are solely due to the introduction of new technologies, such as copper jobs being replaced by fiber jobs. But a lot of the changes to jobs are due to productivity software, where computers can figure things out faster and more accurately than people.

The web is currently full of predictions that the next wave of innovations will impact office workers much more than craft jobs. Outside of the telecom industry, there are some drastic predictions of big changes in the next five years. One of the most immediate jobs that will be under fire is coders. There will always be a place for the smart innovators that come up with unique software ideas, but folks who write the fill-in code or people that debug software are likely to be replaced by AI software that can do the same functions faster and more accurately.

There are predictions that call centers will be emptied out over the next decade when voice software becomes as good at answering customer questions as a live person. The same is true for jobs that deal with a lot of paperwork. Jobs like paralegals, insurance claims specialists, and anything else that means processing repetitive information can be replaced by AI software.

One of the direst predictions is that AI can replace a lot of the work done by high-proficiency experts. For example, the prediction is that medical diagnosis software will be faster and far more accurate than doctors at diagnosing and recommending treatment for diseases. In the telecom world, this might mean replacing jobs like network engineers since software can monitor and react to network issues in real-time. A lot of this has already happened, and it’s amazing how few people it takes today to operate a NOC or data center.

Not all of the predictions are dour. I read one prediction that AI would eliminate 12 million U.S. over the next decade. But these predictions don’t talk about the new jobs that will be created in a world with prevalent AI. I don’t know what those jobs will be, but they are bound to materialize.

Innovation from AI is likely to impact large corporations far sooner than small ones. It’s not hard to envision some of the giant ISPs fully automating the backoffice function to eliminate many customer service, accounting, and other office workers. Little companies are not going to easily duplicate this transition. Employees in smaller ISPs tend to wear many hats and usually don’t perform just one function. The cost for a small company to implement an AI solution might be a lot higher than the savings.

One consequence of improved efficiency for big ISPs might be that it will become easier to justify buying small ISPs and eliminating everybody except the field technicians.

Interestingly, there is one area where most of the predictions agree – that AI will not replace innovators and experts who see the big picture. Nobody believes that software is going to have any creative spark in the coming decades, and maybe never. But that raises an interesting question. How do we grow the next generation of experienced veterans in an industry where a lot of the functions are done by AI? All of the smartest people I know in the broadband industry have worn many different hats during their careers. It is the accumulated experience of working in many parts of the business that makes them an expert.

One thing is sure. ChatGPT and similar software is new, and we’re at the very beginning of the AI revolution. But if this new software meets only a fraction of the early claimed benefits, we’re going to see huge changes across the economy. Whatever is coming is going to be massively disruptive, and working in telecom or any other industry will never be the same.

Competing with ChatGPT

I’ve been writing this blog daily since 2013, and writing it is the favorite part of my day. Writing the blog forces me to research and solidify my thoughts and opinions about various topics. But suddenly, I’m seeing headlines everywhere saying that ChatGPT will soon handle most writing and there will be no need for folks like me who write every day.

I was obviously intrigued and investigated the ChatGPT software. The latest 3.5 version of the software was launched by OpenAI in November 2022. OpenAI is a for-profit software firm that has been researching the field of artificial intelligence (AI) with the stated goal of developing friendly AI. It’s interesting that friendly is a key part of their mission statement because many AI industry pundits predict that AI will likely eventually compete with humans for resources, much like Skynet in the Terminator movies.

ChatGPT is written atop OpenAI’s third generation of software and is aimed at communicating in a written or conversational way so that a reader can’t tell the difference between the software and a human. The company has numerous investors, but Microsoft just offered to buy a 49% stake in the company for $10 billion. This instantly has me wondering when there will be a fee to use the software instead of the free version that is available now.

The press on ChatGPT has been over-the-top. I’ve seen articles comparing the impact of the launch of ChatGPT to other big events in web history, like the first web browser or the iPhone. Articles are touting that the software will mean that programmers will no longer have to write code, that students will no longer have to write papers, and that there will soon be no need for journalists (or bloggers!)

Early-generation AI writing software has been around for a few years and many baseball box scores and press summaries of quarterly earnings reports have been generated by software. These are writing tasks that are formulaic and repetitive, and I doubt that most folks noticed – although the software never captured the magic of a sports reporter like Shirley Povich, who I enjoyed reading every day for years in the Washington Post.

I had to give this platform a try. Was this software capable of writing something like this blog? If so, it would make me reconsider writing every day because if the software is that good there won’t be much need for human writers before long. As I was testing, I also considered the idea of using the software to get a jump start on a new piece of writing – the idea of seeing if the software could structure and organize an idea would be a time saver if the results were usable.

You can give complicated instructions to the software. You can provide the topic, the desired length of the end product, and describe the desired style of writing. I gave the software several topics to write about, and I was impressed with the speed of the process. The finished product is created almost as soon as you say go to the software.

But I was underwhelmed by the results. The sentences are grammatically perfect, and each paragraph has a topic and tries to make a point. Yet the end result was stilted, and some paragraphs were unreadable – I had to reread them several times to try to decipher the point (but for all I know, my readers have to do the same thing!).

The biggest flaw was that the writing was full of factual errors. That makes a lot of sense because the software distills what is written on the web when writing content. It takes the good and the bad, the factual and non-factual, and the easy-to-understand and obtuse writing that exists on the web and mashes it in a synthesis of what it finds. I realized that I would have to fact-check everything ChatGPT writes because the software has no way to discern what is true or untrue. There is a term for this among data scientists, and I read that ChatGPT currently has a hallucination rate of between 15% and 21%, meaning that it seems to make up that percentage of facts in its writing.

I know there is instant hope among students that this software can churn out the dreaded school essay – but that doesn’t look likely. The software has been out for only two months, and I saw that a software engineer has already developed a program that can detect with more than 90% accuracy if something is written by a human or by ChatGPT. Students beware.

The day will likely come when the ChatGPT writing gets better, but there is nothing in this software today that would make me consider giving up writing or even using this as a tool. The hallucination rate means I can’t trust it to be factual, so it’s not even worth using to create a kernel of an idea for a blog. Most importantly, the output is not readable – it’s all perfect English, but I couldn’t understand the point of about half of what it wrote for me. If my blogs are going to be unreadable, I want the obtuseness to be fully human-generated!