TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — When the first-generation iPhone was released by Apple, it was not the first smartphone on the consumer market.

Similar devices had been popular since the late '90s, but the iPhone shone a spotlight on the device, pushing it into the mainstream. Shawn Wen (溫宗憲), the Taiwanese co-founder and CEO of a London-based AI company PolyAI, believes that with ChatGPT, generative AI has reached a similar milestone.

Speaking on the Startup Island TAIWAN podcast, Wen said that ChatGPT represents a marketing breakthrough more than it does a technological one. “(This helps to) bring people’s attention, bring in more resources, and help the business to grow, so in that way ChatGPT is important,” he said.

Kyle Pi (皮克宇), also Taiwanese, and the co-founder and CEO of InstAI agreed, saying that initially he wasn’t impressed by ChatGPT as it did not represent any kind of technological breakthrough. “Architecture and process-wise, there’s not much innovation, so early on I was actually very against it,” he said.

“I thought this is just another large language learning model, people spending a lot of money, and then training a toy (to) claim that it can have human emotions,” Pi said. However, he said that once he put on his “business hat,” he realized where the value in the product was.

He said he is excited to see what new applications will be found as it continues to learn from human input. “So, with my business hat on, I think it’s really exciting, but with my tech hat, I know what it is, and it’s not rocket science,” Pi said

Wen’s company creates realistic voice assistants currently used in the U.K., and said that he would not yet use ChatGPT to generate sentences for customers as it is still too unreliable, though it can be used for other applications. He said that ChaptGPT can summarize the content of the 700 to 1,000 calls his company receives every second, and generate daily reports that help improve the efficacy of the voice assistant in the future.

Wen said that while big companies like Google are beginning to look at it, these companies need highly accurate outputs for their services, something that ChatGPT can not yet provide. “(This kind of) information needs to be close to 100% accurate,” he said.

“ChatGPT doesn’t guarantee that, in fact, all the generative AI doesn’t guarantee that.”