Have you chatted with ChatGPT yet?

We had closed the 15th Oct edition of this newsletter, where we were discussing AI, with the following lines –

“Hey Google, next Sunday, compose and send the partners’ message wishing everyone on account of Diwali, with a creative message which denotes prosperity and happiness, based on my aesthetic preferences.”

Pondering when the commands like above may become a reality, I take your leave.

It appears reality may arrive sooner than we might have expected because on 30th Nov, Open Ai, an AI research & deployment company, launched their AI Chat bot named ChatGPT for public use. The bot takes human inputs in the form of questions and statements to generate human-like text responses, The tool has already garnered over million users, who are simultaneously amazed, excited and feel threatened as social media, especially twitter, is abundant with screenshots of responses received by coders, writers, academics, who had put it to test.

Given the buzz, I tried to test it myself, with the wish I have posted above. After couple of input iterations, following was the response generated by chatGPT –

Dear Startup Community,

As we celebrate the festival of Diwali, the festival of lights, I wanted to take a moment to wish you all prosperity and happiness. May the light of this joyous occasion shine brightly on your businesses and ventures, bringing success and growth.

As members of the startup community, we are always striving to innovate and push the boundaries of what is possible. May this Diwali bring you new ideas and the determination to bring them to life. May it also bring you the support and collaboration of your fellow entrepreneurs, so that together we can create a brighter future.

Here’s to a Diwali filled with fireworks, sweets, and, most importantly, the spark of entrepreneurship. Happy Diwali!

Best regards, [Your Name]

I leave it to your judgment whether the above response passes the Turing test. Alan Turing, the famous computer scientist, in the 1940s had proposed a test for assessing AI. in simple terms, the Turing test is – Can a human judge conversing with a human and with a computer tell which is which? You may try ChatGPT yourself here.

The full form of ChatGPT is Chat – Generative Pre-trained Transformer. More accurately, it is an application based on a language model, being refined by OpenAI since its first launch in 2018. A language model is a software that prints out a sequence of words as output that are related to some words given as input with appropriate semantic relation.

ChatGPT is also a neural network. Simplistically, a neural network would be a large network of computers that can fine tune its output of words based on the feedback given to it during the stages of training. These networks have refined over time significantly. E.g. If we recall early computer generated translations, often the words were translated without context, often resulting in hilarious nonsense. This was overcome with a further refining technique called “Transformer”, through which a neural network can accurately “understand” the context of a sentence or a paragraph. This refined “comprehension” can be used for multiple purposes like answering a question, summarising a paragraph or an article.

One of the most talked about advantages or possibilities of ChatGPT is – whether it is the next big thing in internet search? Or in other words can it be an alternative to Google? The reason being we do not receive contextual answers when we search on Google. What we end up receiving is a list of often irrelevant links to pages which would not solve our pointed query. That is not to say Google does not have a language model of its own but ChatGPT is much more conversational.

The most significant limitations of ChatGPT have been clearly outlined at OpenAi page itself which everyone should read –

‘ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers. Fixing this issue is challenging, as: (1) during RL training, there’s currently no source of truth; (2) training the model to be more cautious causes it to decline questions that it can answer correctly; and (3) supervised training misleads the model because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows.’

For all of its limitations, generative AI is here to stay. The key takeaway for startups is that applicability and usage of AI, might be dependent on easy to use human-centric conversational interfaces rather than robustness of the underlying complex models.

Ecosystem Ventures This Week

Key Highlights – Events

We are happy to share that Mr. Shailesh Jain (VP, Ecosystem Ventures) was a part of a panel discussion as a moderator at the PRARAMBH event, a Start-up summit 2022 where 10 shortlisted startups across India pitched to the panel, organized by AIC-Prestige, held in Indore.

Startup Funding Summary

Renee Cosmetics, Ahmedabad-based makeup brand, has raised $25 Mn in Series B funding from Evolvence India, Edelweiss Group, Equanimity and 9Unicorns – Read More

Vidyut, Bangalore-based EV financing startup, has raised $4 Mn in a funding from Force Ventures, Veda VC, Sujeet Kumar, Sahil Barua, Kunal Shah, Sriharsha Majety and Rajat Verma – Read More

Accacia, Gurgaon-based real estate platform, has raised $3 Mn in Seed funding from B Capital Group, Accel, Blume Ventures, Good Capital, Zerodha’s Rainmatter Fund, Loyal VC and other HNIs – Read More

AlgoBulls, Mumbai-based retail stock-trading platform, has raised $2 Mn in Pre-Series A funding from Venture Catalysts, DSP Group, Findoc Finvest, Nitin Shahi, LetsVenture, Dishant Milan Parikh, Yuvraj Thakker, Sharath Kumar and other HNIs – Read More

Mabel, Bangalore-based jewellery marketplace startup, has raised $2 Mn in Seed funding from Whiteboard Capital, Sauce VC and Incubate Fund – Read More

M&A Snippets

Gurgaon-based food and beverage company Biryani By Kilo has acquired Mumbai-based food and beverage startup Get-A-Whey for $2 Mn – Read More

Mumbai-based consumer goods company Hindustan Unilever will acquire Mumbai-based food nutrition company Nutritionalab for $9 Mn – Read More