Award winner: ChatGPT: The Future of AI?

Award winner: ChatGPT: The Future of AI?
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This case won the Knowledge, Information and Communication Systems Management category at The Case Centre Awards and Competitions 2024. #CaseAwards2024

View photos from the awards presentation on 24 June 2024.

Who – the protagonist

Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI.

What?

In 2022, Artificial Intelligence (AI) was going through a transformation stage with increased interest and investment in this space.

San Francisco-based OpenAI, a start-up initially co-founded by Elon Musk, hogged the limelight with ChatGPT, said to be the best AI chatbot released to the public through a free, easy-to-use web interface.

ChatGPT impressed with its ability to mimic conversations, write poetry and prose, solve coding problems, and synthesise knowledge from the web.

ChatGPT’s value stood at $20billion, after $1billion was originally invested in December 2015.

Robot hand laptop AI

Why?

Despite AI’s potential to transform humanity, there were major concerns about the potential for academic fraud, misinformation, and mass unemployment.

There were also fears that big players such as Google, Meta, and Microsoft were rushing developments in AI to the detriment of humanity.

Should humanity take advantage of the benefits of AI or was the world not yet ready to deal with the impact of such AI tools?

Where?

A global phenomena, the AI race was being led by Silicon Valley tech giants and start-ups.

When?

After the release of OpenAI’s first commercial product, GPT-3 in 2020, ChatGPT followed on 30 November 2022, with the dialogue format making it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.

Key quote

“We seem to be in a situation where most people hardly think about the future of artificial intelligence, while the few who dedicate their attention to it find it plausible that one of the biggest transformations in humanity’s history is likely to happen within our lifetimes.”
Max Roser, Director, Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development, University of Oxford.

What next?

Start-ups like OpenAI were planning to take AI as far as it would go, with the ultimate ambition being to create artificial general intelligence (AGI) – systems that are generally smarter than humans.

While this required an understanding of the physical world writ large, experts doubted whether methods used to develop technologies like GPT-4 would be capable of producing AGI. Experts also questioned whether there was a need for AI to become that powerful.

Ultimately, if AGI can be achieved, is there any way of stopping it?

AUTHOR PERSPECTIVE 

This is the authors’ first win while Amity Research Centers are now owners of two awards after winning the Economics, Politics and Business Environment category in 2023.

Winning the award

Vasudha said: It is an honour and a privilege to receive the Knowledge, Information and Communication Systems Management award. Receiving this award strengthens our commitment and increases our desire to learn further.”

Case popularity

Vasudha continued: “ChatGPT, the latest tool in AI, has greatly impacted the world on diverse platforms. The case helped students understand the latest developments in AI and the impact generative AI will have on human creativity. The contemporariness of the topic was a key reason behind its popularity. The various controversies generated by generative AI also made it ideal for a lively and informative discussion in class.”

Writing the case

She added: “Yes, there were challenges. There was a deluge of news and articles on ChatGPT along with numerous developments in AI and its applications. These rapid developments and advances in AI made it very challenging to write the case. It was a challenge to sort through the vast information available and also very interesting to learn about the progress happening in this domain. The various issues that cropped up daily relating to the usage of generative AI brought to light the potential of the innovation and also what could go wrong with the new technology.”

AI artificial intelligence

Case writing advice

She commented: “My top tip for writing a good case would be to select a theme or topic which one is passionate about and one that would make students think outside the box. This would help drive the concept in the class very effectively and provide a rich learning experience.

“It is important to write a case on the current happenings to make it lively and facilitate a good class discussion and debate.”

Teaching the case

Vasudha stated: “Teaching this case was a very interesting experience. The case study fitted into the domains of Knowledge, Information and Communication Systems as well as Ethics and Social Responsibility. As AI products got closer to attaining human level intelligence the pros and cons became very critical to humankind. Thus, the case study facilitated learning and debates on various levels. Students were very enthusiastic about the topic given the timing of the launch and its ramifications. Since it was a contemporary event and most of them had tried ChatGPT first-hand, the topic generated passionate arguments.”

Final word

Vasudha concluded: “It was imperative that students are made aware of these aspects so that they would be better prepared as they entered this evolving scenario.

“Ultimately even as numerous AI based apps flooded the market, businesses and individual users had the chance to choose how they wished to use it. Companies could either decide to use tools such as ChatGPT and other Gen AI models to give workers more abilities or to simply cut jobs and trim costs. It was felt that the solution was not to deter the progress of technology, but to eliminate or reverse the excess incentives for automation over augmentation. It was essential to put in place a set of practical benchmarks that would steer progress toward AI-powered systems that would exceed human intelligence.

“We would also like to highlight the impact of AI on case writing and teaching. As with any industry, there are pros and cons attached to this. Will the use of AI in case writing impact case writers and the quality of case studies being produced? Currently there is a lot of ambiguity in using AI in case writing and hence the need for concrete guidelines to take this forward is the need of the hour.”

INSTRUCTOR VIEWPOINT 

Discover how this case works in the classroom.

“The case was a great starting point for a critical discussion on the importance of responsible innovation and the role of innovation in socio-technical transformation processes.”
Dagmara Weckowska, ‘Responsible and Sustainable Innovation’ Research Group Lead, Freie Universität Berlin.

THE CASE 

The case

Who – the protagonist

Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI.

What?

In 2022, Artificial Intelligence (AI) was going through a transformation stage with increased interest and investment in this space.

San Francisco-based OpenAI, a start-up initially co-founded by Elon Musk, hogged the limelight with ChatGPT, said to be the best AI chatbot released to the public through a free, easy-to-use web interface.

ChatGPT impressed with its ability to mimic conversations, write poetry and prose, solve coding problems, and synthesise knowledge from the web.

ChatGPT’s value stood at $20billion, after $1billion was originally invested in December 2015.

Robot hand laptop AI

Why?

Despite AI’s potential to transform humanity, there were major concerns about the potential for academic fraud, misinformation, and mass unemployment.

There were also fears that big players such as Google, Meta, and Microsoft were rushing developments in AI to the detriment of humanity.

Should humanity take advantage of the benefits of AI or was the world not yet ready to deal with the impact of such AI tools?

Where?

A global phenomena, the AI race was being led by Silicon Valley tech giants and start-ups.

When?

After the release of OpenAI’s first commercial product, GPT-3 in 2020, ChatGPT followed on 30 November 2022, with the dialogue format making it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.

Key quote

“We seem to be in a situation where most people hardly think about the future of artificial intelligence, while the few who dedicate their attention to it find it plausible that one of the biggest transformations in humanity’s history is likely to happen within our lifetimes.”
Max Roser, Director, Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development, University of Oxford.

What next?

Start-ups like OpenAI were planning to take AI as far as it would go, with the ultimate ambition being to create artificial general intelligence (AGI) – systems that are generally smarter than humans.

While this required an understanding of the physical world writ large, experts doubted whether methods used to develop technologies like GPT-4 would be capable of producing AGI. Experts also questioned whether there was a need for AI to become that powerful.

Ultimately, if AGI can be achieved, is there any way of stopping it?

AUTHOR PERSPECTIVE 

Author perspective

This is the authors’ first win while Amity Research Centers are now owners of two awards after winning the Economics, Politics and Business Environment category in 2023.

Winning the award

Vasudha said: It is an honour and a privilege to receive the Knowledge, Information and Communication Systems Management award. Receiving this award strengthens our commitment and increases our desire to learn further.”

Case popularity

Vasudha continued: “ChatGPT, the latest tool in AI, has greatly impacted the world on diverse platforms. The case helped students understand the latest developments in AI and the impact generative AI will have on human creativity. The contemporariness of the topic was a key reason behind its popularity. The various controversies generated by generative AI also made it ideal for a lively and informative discussion in class.”

Writing the case

She added: “Yes, there were challenges. There was a deluge of news and articles on ChatGPT along with numerous developments in AI and its applications. These rapid developments and advances in AI made it very challenging to write the case. It was a challenge to sort through the vast information available and also very interesting to learn about the progress happening in this domain. The various issues that cropped up daily relating to the usage of generative AI brought to light the potential of the innovation and also what could go wrong with the new technology.”

AI artificial intelligence

Case writing advice

She commented: “My top tip for writing a good case would be to select a theme or topic which one is passionate about and one that would make students think outside the box. This would help drive the concept in the class very effectively and provide a rich learning experience.

“It is important to write a case on the current happenings to make it lively and facilitate a good class discussion and debate.”

Teaching the case

Vasudha stated: “Teaching this case was a very interesting experience. The case study fitted into the domains of Knowledge, Information and Communication Systems as well as Ethics and Social Responsibility. As AI products got closer to attaining human level intelligence the pros and cons became very critical to humankind. Thus, the case study facilitated learning and debates on various levels. Students were very enthusiastic about the topic given the timing of the launch and its ramifications. Since it was a contemporary event and most of them had tried ChatGPT first-hand, the topic generated passionate arguments.”

Final word

Vasudha concluded: “It was imperative that students are made aware of these aspects so that they would be better prepared as they entered this evolving scenario.

“Ultimately even as numerous AI based apps flooded the market, businesses and individual users had the chance to choose how they wished to use it. Companies could either decide to use tools such as ChatGPT and other Gen AI models to give workers more abilities or to simply cut jobs and trim costs. It was felt that the solution was not to deter the progress of technology, but to eliminate or reverse the excess incentives for automation over augmentation. It was essential to put in place a set of practical benchmarks that would steer progress toward AI-powered systems that would exceed human intelligence.

“We would also like to highlight the impact of AI on case writing and teaching. As with any industry, there are pros and cons attached to this. Will the use of AI in case writing impact case writers and the quality of case studies being produced? Currently there is a lot of ambiguity in using AI in case writing and hence the need for concrete guidelines to take this forward is the need of the hour.”

INSTRUCTOR VIEWPOINT 

Instructor viewpoint

Discover how this case works in the classroom.

“The case was a great starting point for a critical discussion on the importance of responsible innovation and the role of innovation in socio-technical transformation processes.”
Dagmara Weckowska, ‘Responsible and Sustainable Innovation’ Research Group Lead, Freie Universität Berlin.

THE CASE 

The protagonist

Sam Altman
Co-founder and CEO
Read the case

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CASE - Reference no. 923-0012-1
TEACHING NOTE - Reference no. 923-0012-8
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Become a member organisation

Don't miss a thing - join our case community today.

Benefits include: lower prices for teaching materials, free access for your students to Learning with Cases: An Interactive Study Guide, royalties on case sales, free attendance at the annual Case Forum, discounted case workshop places and much more!

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