'ChatGPT is today's hand calculator,' this CEO says

Will you be able to build the next blockbuster videogame at home using ChatGPT?

Not so fast, says Take-Two Interactive Software Inc.
TTWO,
-3.40%
Chief Executive Strauss Zelnick. But that doesn’t mean the technology lacks promise.

Read: Take-Two stock slips as company plans cost cuts, outlook falls below Street view

Zelnick said on his company’s earnings call Monday that he’s typically the “first person to be skeptical of other people’s hype,” but this time around, he’s “really excited about what we’re seeing right now with ChatGPT and other leaps forward in artificial intelligence and machine learning.”

“ChatGPT is today’s hand calculator. You know, when I was a kid, there was no such thing. I hate to admit it, but it’s true. So I had to do math longhand and then hand calculators came along and parents were up in arms about, oh, kids won’t have to learn math anymore. And the answer is yes, you still will learn math, turns out you absolutely have to learn math.”


— Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick

ChatGPT, a chatbot put out by OpenAI, has created a frenzy on Wall Street and beyond as people contemplate more seriously what AI can do for business. It’s part of “a very exciting era of new tools” that can “allow our teams and our competitors’ teams to do really interesting things more efficiently,” but the technology won’t overhaul the videogame industry entirely, in Zelnick’s view.

It may not even help improve the “cost structure” of gaming businesses, he noted, since “any time you make things easier, we’re going to want to do more and our teams will want to do more.”

Take-Two puts out such franchises as “Grand Theft Auto,” “Red Dead” and “NBA 2K,” and Zelnick isn’t exactly shaking in his boots over the thought of people replicating the magic of game development in their basements.

“It’s not going to allow someone to say, please develop the competitor to ‘Grand Theft Auto,’ that’s better than ‘Grand Theft Auto,’” Zelnick said, according to a FactSet transcript. “People will try, but that won’t happen.”

ChatGPT came up as well on Chegg Inc.’s
CHGG,
-1.45%
earnings call Monday. The maker of online-learning tools was set to shed 20% of its market value after it delivered a disappointing forecast Monday afternoon, but Chief Executive Dan Rosensweig isn’t sweating the ChatGPT threat either.

“AI and machine-learning models are not new to Chegg,” he said on the earnings call, according to a transcript provided by AlphaSense/Sentieo. “We have been leveraging these technologies within our platform for years, and we believe these continued advancements will benefit Chegg as students. As an example, we’ve been using GPT-2 inside of our writing products, improving our ability to provide support with grammar, paraphrasing and sentence structure.”

GPT-2 is a language model created by OpenAI.

AI has been a hot topic on corporate earnings calls this cycle, with Alphabet Inc.
GOOG,
-1.66%

GOOGL,
-1.79%,
Meta Platforms Inc.
META,
-0.25%,
and Microsoft Corp.
MSFT,
-0.61%
among the most talkative.

Wallace Witkowski and Jeremy C. Owens contributed reporting from San Francisco

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