Flipkart explores ChatGPT use cases, drones for delivery
- ByStartupStory | January 17, 2023
Advanced artificial intelligence (AI) platforms like ChatGPT are being included by Walmart-owned online retailer Flipkart in an effort to strengthen its tech foundation. The business, which has previously employed AI to combat fraud and logistics difficulties, is experimenting with chatbots based on natural language generation (NLG), akin to Open AI’s ChatGPT. Flipkart’s chief product and technology officer, Jeyandran Venugopal, said.
“We are very, very interested in exploring use cases of ChatGPT and are looking at large NLG models. In fact, we have something cooking and we are working on it in the backend,” said Venugopal while adding that the technology still needs a lot of work.
He voiced concern, nevertheless, about the degree of accuracy and susceptibility to provide false information.
“So if you’re just doing general chit-chat and you get incorrect information on which you’re not basing any monetary decisions like buying a product it is fine. Even OpenAI has warned against using it for anything really critical as there are a lot of issues to be bugged out,” he added.
Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, issued a caution about ChatGPT last month, saying it cannot be trusted for “anything serious.”
To be clear, while utilising ChatGPT in its initiatives may be novel, Flipkart isn’t unfamiliar with language models. According to Venugopal, the business has thus far concentrated more on Google’s Bidirectional Encoder Representations, or Bert, and conventional natural language processing (NLP).
NLP describes computer programmes that can interpret the meaning of a body of text. On the other hand, NLG is made up of algorithms that can produce text in human language. Bert belongs in the first category, while ChatGPT does not.
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Venugopal also mentioned that the company will keep making investments this year to enhance the personalised experience for customers and to cover technologies like voice and picture search and automated machine translation. The business added live commerce, picture search, and a new section for premium products to its shopping app last year in addition to making a number of visual modifications to streamline navigation.
According to Venugopal, the leader in e-commerce also plans to invest more in camera-based features for discovery and augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and other technologies. Since metaverse technologies are still in their infancy, Flipkart also revealed a platform for testing the waters last year dubbed Flipverse. The business is also trying to investigate collaborations within the broader blockchain ecosystem.
Flipkart is developing drone-based delivery to enhance goods physical delivery. Venugopal claimed that the business conducted tests with the Telangana government last year to supply vital life-saving medications, plasma, blood, and vaccines using drones. The company has now moved on to middle-mile delivery experiments for smaller bag-sized shipments (deliveries of items from warehouse to distribution hubs).
“But doing last-mile deliveries (deliveries to actual consumers) using drones will take more time as the technology needs to mature a lot more,” said Venugopal.
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