ChatGPT for innovation: interview with Hervé MARY, CEO of MARYLINK

Hervé MARY is CEO of MARYLINKa pioneer in Augmented Collaborative Innovation. He explains how ChatGPT is revolutionizing collaborative innovation, and how MARYLINK platforms are harnessing its potential to boost organizational innovation.

How do you see ChatGPT's benefits for organizations?

ChatGPT is the talk of the town. ChatGPT codes, does homework for students, . It can write a song, a poem or a personalized, detailed "lawyer's letter" to your noisy next-door neighbor!

There's no shortage of examples, and it does all this and more with a disconcerting level of quality.

So at this stage, is it still a gadget for organizations?

A grotesque Parrot limited to small individual tasks?

He's a creative person, but can he be effective and efficient enough to bring value to a complex innovation process?

ChatGPT sometimes talks nonsense! No ?

There are many criticisms of ChatGPT. These criticisms are legitimate. But they miss the essential point.

Some write articles that only try to explain that it's commonplace. That innovation is limited. That it's not a breakthrough.

And many point out the sometimes comical weaknesses. It's become a game, almost viral...

For example, He'll argue, with conviction that chicken eggs are naturally more fragile than... cow eggs! When everyone knows that it's actually the other way around 🙂

Make no mistake. It's not a gadget. a veritable revolution. Not an incremental innovation. More than a breakthrough, it's a disruptive innovation. And even more than that...

This will change the way we work as a group.

But beyond that, it will gradually be invited, or almost inevitably invite itself, into the very heart of value creation in organizations: it will revolutionize our ability to innovate as a group, in the long term...

What makes ChatGPT so effective?

Despite his youth, he's already able to think on his feet.

He doesn't think. He has no opinions, no feelings. He's not really capable of them. And that's a good thing.

But he is capable of thinking, in multiple ways, in series on a precise subject. Or to link a concept to parallel subjects with disconcerting ease. And in the end, that's what's most astonishing.

He doesn't think, but he can Think. In the etymological sense, i.e. "to bend backwards, to curl; to bring back" He is able to fold and bend his billions of pieces of knowledge with incredible agility to present them in a new light. 

Doesn't ChatGPT run the risk of replacing employees?

It does not replace humans! It considerably enhances their cognitive abilities!

Humans are in fact able to distinguish a large number of nuances thanks to their consciousness and their ability to think through several prisms. Humans have a unique sensory perception.

It's as if we humans were endowed with the ability to distinguish the color nuances of an image, or of several images. With subtle gradations that the machine won't see.

But our ability to visualize in "2D" is limited compared to that of machines.

ChatGPT doesn't have this sensitivity. It doesn't nuance much, it's 12 levels of gray.

But he's also able to think in 3D!

It can "think in 3D"? Meaning?

It is capable of bringing to light facets unexplored by the human mind.

Obviously, the human needs to be able to propose the right angles of attack or prompts, at the right moment in the conversation with chatGPT, but that's another story...

Furthermore, machines can process and visualize images faster and more efficiently than humans.

Ask him to add 10 related ideas to a single idea and he'll do the job... For us humans, it's complicated to be able to generate so many different ideas. We don't have the ability to put our mental images into perspective so quickly.

For him, it's a piece of cake! He loves it, he can do it without getting tired. For us, it's exhausting.

ChatGPT is programmed to be a very natural "outside the box" thinker. It can provide an almost unlimited number of mental images!

You often refer to the "thaumatrope" concept. Could you tell us more about it?

Whereas our human mind spends a great deal of time studying each mental image in all its nuances, ChatGPT is able to associate a very large number of images in record time and paste them one after the other in a logical fashion. The result is a coherent film.

That's why, intuitively, I see him as a thaumatrope knowledge.

So I asked CHatGPT about it. He confirmed it for me. He doesn't "understand the film of what he's saying", as my daughter would say, but by connecting a large number of words (or images, in our analogy) in a logical way, the human brain will see a coherent and exploitable film.

in this way, he is able to unfold a new film in a matter of seconds, with different scenarios, different contexts, different narrators...

Well, it's still in its infancy, in the style of "the artist", early cinema, silent, black and white with omnipresent precautionary subtitles.

But for "spinning" ideas, it's more than enough.

What skills do employees need to use ChatGPT?

No special skills required. It's very simple. Just tell them what ChatGPT can and can't do. And give them a few tips on how to use prompts in their professional environment.

In my opinion, prompt" is the new frontier of creativity. To find the right angle, you need to know how to ask the right questions, the right prompts as the neo-specialists say. 

Although it thinks in 3D, it is not yet capable of deciding for itself to present the object in a particular way, so that its most relevant or creative facets come to the fore.

It's up to you to manipulate the object. It's as if you were using language to operate an object in the hand of an articulated robot. But as you've seen, this robot understands everything you ask it to, and in your own vocabulary.

In any case, the subject of skills is particularly interesting. In our initial tests, we found that the interface engages more and in a much broader way. In fact, using a collaborative innovation platform with a dialogue tool like ChatGPT makes it possible to value employees' experience and creativity, even if they have difficulty expressing themselves orally or in writing!

In conclusion, what do you see as the role of conversational agents like ChatGPT for organizations looking to innovate?

In conclusion, I would say that ChatGPT is certainly not perfect. He can't be trusted for fact checking. He often "hallucinates" and tells it like it is... on the other hand, he'll be a team player, still a little too sure of himself and a bit of a blabbermouth.

But for brainstorming and scenario planning, it's perfect!

But to get things moving, and to get an idea "spinning" on several dimensions, it's an unprecedented, unique, high-performance tool with very high added value.

Despite this, it's very economical. You can start using it right away, while maintaining a high level of interaction with humans. And that's where he'll perform best. Don't expect him to come up with the idea of the century all by himself!

But when integrated into the right innovation tool, allowing it to express itself while leaving the human element in charge, it's an essential sparring partner.

All that remains is to find the right software suite that exploits these capabilities with the best possible integration within an innovative organization.

That's just what we do at MARYLINK 🙂