ChatGPT and Manufacturing

<p>Manufacturing has played a major role over time in advancing automation, computerization, digitization, and more. Our industries are amazingly different now than they were 15 years ago, much less 30.</p><p>In December of 2022 the company OpenAI released an online product called ChatGPT. Unless you're living under a rock, you've at least heard of it. You may not understand what it does, and very few understand how it works. It is, however taking the world by storm.</p><p>The question for you is, does ChatGPT offer value to manufacturers?</p><p>The short answer is: No, at least not yet. </p><p>But the longer answer is: The literally awesome advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) reflected in the technical underpinnings of the product lay the groundwork for a very different future for all of us. </p><p>Importantly it should reassure us that parallel efforts building AI capabilities to solve other larger problems are advancing quickly also.</p><p>So why do I believe ChatGPT does not help us manufacturers now? Because it suffers from a problem that all AI will need to overcome: What is the truth used as the basis of its advancing logic and reasoning?</p><p>A recent LinkedIn post bragged about the great answer received from ChatGPT when asked to distinguish lean from six-sigma. The problem is, the answer was significantly inaccurate. </p><p>How can that happen? Alleged experts have to guide the AI tool's initial learning in understanding what is true and what is not true. As it trains itself on logic/reasoning from that information, it receives continued guidance, though less and less as its training is judged to be high quality.</p><p>This product is not just a fancy Google search engine. In fact it relies heavily on the quality of the information it considers, while Google merely spits back links to what it sees as relevant web content.</p><p>How does a manufacturing leader, who obviously has a plate full already, consider the ever evolving technologies arising daily?</p><p>In larger organizations with better t