This week saw one of the most successful technology launches in history, but one for many of people has flown under the radar. ChatGPT is a chatbot developed by OpenAI, a Silicon Valley based research firm, backed with over a billion dollars from the likes of Elon Musk and Microsoft.

ChatGPT has reached over 1 million users in less than a week, a figure that took Twitter 2 years, Facebook 10 months, and Instagram about 10 weeks. It is so popular that trying to access the tool at a busy time led to the below message:

But why is a chatbot so popular? 

The truth is that chatbot is probably the wrong term. When we think of chatbots, we are used to simple responses that try (and often fail) to answer our questions. ChatGPT is different, it can give highly complex answers to questions that even human experts would struggle to respond to so quickly. To put it through its paces, I grilled it about the future of AI, cyber threats and even asked it to give me a little bit of career advice. 

Below are the unedited results:

ChatGPT is off to a good start, not only does this echo the words of our cyber recruitment team, but reflects the views of the wider community. 

A good bot is a humble bot, that is aware of its shortcomings and doesn't try to hide them.

Whilst we are a long way away from relying on AI to take over human roles, ChatGPT hits the nail on the head with automated threat analysis; something that is already in play within the market. 

Maybe in the future, junior routes into cyber will include 'AI Wrangler' roles?

I don't envy the CISO who has to explain to their boss the attack vector was an unpatched coffee machine.

Automated patching? On coffee machines!? If ChatGPT is to be believed, maybe that CISO will be fine. 

A very diplomatic response from ChatGPT.

Is there anything ChatGPT cannot do?

Well, yes:

If you want to put ChatGPT through its paces, check it out here. But if you want real advice from experienced humans, find your local office contact details here. We will put you in touch with someone who you can trust for assistance in finding a career where you can make a difference. 

The image used for the banner image for this blog was created with ChatGPT's image-based sister product Dall-E, which can also be found on the OpenAI website.