How Vietnam’s tech industry utilizes ChatGPT

After using ChatGPT to find faulty codes and look up technical terms for a week, Hoang Quan felt that it was time to expand AI’s scope of assisting him with his daily work.

Quan, a CTO of a company specializing in website services, said that ChatGPT is capable of creating short codes to build a basic website within minutes. To accomplish the same task, it might take an engineer an entire day to manually code an entire website.

“ChatGPT can do much more than funny conversations that people often share online,” he said, adding that the language model AI can assist with writing code, bug checking and finding potential logic errors, among other programming tasks.

To figure out ChatGPT’s true capabilities, Quan decided to let his company’s Quality Control team compete with AI to see which one can detect more faulty codes. ChatGPT emerged as the clear victor, both when it comes to the number of faulty codes detected and the amount of time it took to find them.

Thu Hien, a specialist at the company, said the human side sometimes wins thanks to their experience and knowledge about the project. However, if ChatGPT were allowed to read all the codes of the project, it is likely that the chat bot might be able to find faulty parts that even the most experienced programmers may miss.

Engineers said programs designed to find bugs are not something new in the programming field. However, what sets ChatGPT apart is how quickly it can explain a problem and reach for a solution.

Analytic prowess

Programming is not the only thing that ChatGPT can do. The AI has already been used by some companies for data analysis.

Le Cong Thanh, founder of CMCC, said that in the past, people would need to read and extrapolate data and statistics to create reports. Such a task is time-consuming, taking days or even weeks to be completed.

But once ChatGPT’s API has been integrated, it may only take around 30 minutes to an hour to create a high-quality report.

For now, ChatGPT is not as proficient in Vietnamese as it is in English, so the company still uses it in conjunction with Google Translate.

“ChatGPT expresses itself in English very well, and Google Translate’s translation is good, so editing the report does not take much time,” Thanh said.

He said AI’s capabilities for analysis is “better than the average intern.” It can quickly compare and give additional analyses about social issues, brands or the market.

“ChatGPT also paves the way for us to approach data analysis report service for foreign markets, something we have never dared to think about before.”

Several startup firms, including English-teaching company eJoy, are also integrating ChatGPT’s API into their platforms for a more exciting experience for language learners.

An eJoy representative said the ChatGPT model interacts mainly through messages, but language learning requires using voices as well. As such, the firm has integrated a tool capable of converting text to speech, and vice versa, for learners to practice with verbal communication.

Nguyen Hoang Bao, a Google developer expert on machine learning, said ChatGPT can be used for multiple purposes in tech, including writing codes, bug checking, customer service or SQL queries. With the AI assistance, engineers would have more time to focus on more specialized tasks, he added.

Quan, however, said his company only uses the AI for some simple projects, as confidentiality clauses do not allow the upload of source codes onto public platforms like OpenAI. He said the chat bot would be most useful for users with knowledge of the platform, and who know how to make AI do what they want it to do.

Thanh said that if ChatGPT is not given a clear prompt, or if the reports it produces are not properly edited, the data analysis might be inaccurate, or even false. Moreover, the cost of using Open AI’s API is still quite high for the Vietnamese market.

“In the next few years, software utilizing the power of ChatGPT and other similar language models will show up in all kinds of fields, bringing powerful and accessible tools, and reducing the workload for many people,” Thanh said.