How custom ChatGPT for business differs from traditional chatbots

Chatbots have been used in companies for years to support employees and customers. However, ChatGPT, released at the end of 2022, brought a major shift, being the first to cross the threshold of perceived “usefulness.”

Chatbots: 10 years of development

Chatbots have been in development for over 10 years, mostly using a so-called “imitation strategy” – questions and answers in databases are used to train machine learning models to mimic them. This strategy comes with several problems:

1. Data shortage: There usually aren’t enough “clean” questions and answers to train a language model well. This limits the model’s capabilities.
2. Limited knowledge: Since the model is based on existing data, it cannot answer questions it hasn’t seen before. This means the model’s usefulness is limited.
3. Time-consuming retraining: If info changes, the model must be retrained, which is a time- and resource-intensive process.

GPT technology: a new paradigm

GPT technology represents a new approach. Unlike traditional chatbots, no separate model training is needed for a company-customized GPT. Instead, a pre-trained “smart” model is given access to the company’s existing documents. Data science techniques are then used to select the documents most likely to contain the correct answer.

This means a company gets an AI as intelligent as ChatGPT, but with the added ability to answer company-specific questions. It’s also important to note that, unlike traditional chatbots, there is no need to retrain the model – answers update immediately as the documents change.

Therefore, a company-specific GPT assistant represents a completely new approach to chatbots, offering greater flexibility, better response quality, and lower resource costs, making it an ideal tool for increasing efficiency.