I have spent the last few weeks understanding the impact of a great revolution in the world of Artificial Intelligence and NLP on the customer experience. Not from a purely technical point of view, but trying to estimate the competitive advantage that this new approach can generate. We are facing yet another disruptive innovation, and it can bring significant advantages, let’s try to find out which ones.

It all started with the paper “Attention Is All You Need” that has put the NLP world in turmoil. It was immediately understood that something new appeared in the world of artificial intelligence. This was immediately followed by the release of BERT and the associated paper. Skipping a few milestones, OpenAI presented his new model GPT-3, a model that, according to those who have tried it, offers incredible performance. Unfortunately, GPT-3 will not be an open-source model as it is GPT-2.

But what can these models really do, and why are they hailed as the new NLP frontier? I will try to explain it to you in simple terms the competitive advantage they can provide to those who can skillfully employ them to support business processes.

First of all, we are talking about pre-trained models. They are models trained by millions and millions of data. Models designed to act in a completely unsupervised way, generalizing the context as much as possible. It is, of course, possible to fine-tune them with a minimum effort, to focus on the specific context.

In this case, we are talking about transfer learning, something like training a human brain to get the knowledge to pass the maturity exam, and then later make them study a very precise field. Fine-tune the brain to understand and generalize in that field. I realize it’s a bit of a long-shot similarity, but you get the idea.

#artificial-intelligence #user-experience #customer-journey #hackernoon-top-story #ai