Beyond The Hype of ChatGPT: How to Unlock AI for Real Estate
It's hard to ignore the buzz around OpenAI's newest release, ChatGPT, the latest development in the GPT series of super large language models. It’s being hyped by some as a huge labor-saving tool. But how can this technology be leveraged to benefit real estate owners and operators?
The answer lies in AI and real estate teams working together to develop domain-specific solutions, combining the most recent advancements in technology with industry knowledge to create practical solutions for your real estate business.
What is a Large Language Model?
Large language models are a type of machine learning model trained to understand the meaning and context of words and sentences from massive amounts of text data scraped from the internet. You already interact with language models every day: they're used to rank search results, automate translations, and summarize news articles. The auto-complete feature on your phone? That's a language model.
Since their development started to accelerate in 2018, the use of language models has been growing at an astonishing rate. A new space race has been ignited, with larger and larger language models being trained. Supercomputers are processing datasets containing billions of words, and companies like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Salesforce are investing heavily to stay ahead of the competition.
What Does it Do?
In short, these models are mastering language and memorizing knowledge contained in the training data. The data is so vast that you can ask general knowledge questions and receive coherent answers. The conversational flow is very smooth and feels convincing. It's easy to see why people are starting to wonder if this kind of technology will replace human staff: If AI can create a story, answer general knowledge questions, and write an apartment listing, is helping residents and prospects no problem too?
The Problems
If you look past the hype, even ignoring some well-documented shortcomings of super large language models, including bias (racism, sexism, etc.), overconfidence (or lying), and unpredictability, why aren’t large language models replacing people in real estate? The answer lies in what your team can do that ChatGPT can’t.
Your team has industry knowledge learned, not through reading, but by doing.
Your team has experience of dealing with thousands of different types of requests from residents and prospects.
Your team can adjust its behavior based on changing situations.
Your team can interact with your other software systems.
Large language models can't do any of these things on their own.
So How Can We Use AI?
In a nutshell, your teams have more than just the ability to use language; they have layered resident, property, company, and industry knowledge. They also have job experience, awareness of industry best practices, process knowledge, and decision-making experience.
To bring AI into your team, you need to turn to industry-specific AI solutions. Solutions like Adam, where a team of AI & real estate specialists work solely on layering real estate knowledge, processes and experience on top of more general models, to create a tool that compliments the work of property managers, allowing them to prioritize the tasks that are most important for their residents and team. The models that OpenAI, Facebook, Google, and others are pioneering form some of the building blocks, but to effectively supplement your team with an AI teammate, you’ll need to partner with domain-specialized R&D companies.
There’s no doubt that in the next ten years AI will impact your business. By partnering with specialists, you will be able to look past the hype and unlock the power of AI.