Ok guys, back in November i heard about chatGPT and even signed up at Open.ai to try it out. I probably gave it a spin on day 2 of its release. When I first got it up and going i asked it a couple questions and it had some interesting responses, but I wasn’t exactly impressed. It was fun, but not fun enough for me to try it out a second time. I forgot about it for a while and over the last few weeks we are now getting bombarded with all types of news on how its going to change the world as we know it, change search as we know it, put companies (maybe even google) out of business, and replace even highly educated professionals.
I was a bit skeptical about this to say the least. First off, there is an enormous list of things that have been invented in my life that people claimed would change the world as we know it and there are really only a handful of things that actually have (Segways definitely gave it a good effort).
For someone to say a Chatbot is going make some incredible impact on the world by being able to give me better recommendations on places to visit when I’m traveling to a new city, write a children’s book or blog, or even help me write a few simple functions so i can focus on the more difficult parts of a software application is difficult for me to understand. Plus…when i first tried ChatGPT (on day 2 of its release) I used it for less then 5 minutes and never tried it again. So, I thought about it this week after Microsoft made another big announcement about its plan to integrate it with Bing (yeah, i almost forgot Bing was still a thing…) and decided i must be missing something. If people are so convinced that ChatGPT integrated with Bing is going to topple Google there must be something I didn’t see the first time around….
This brings me to the problem I’ve been trying to solve at my company for the last few months…maybe ChatGPT has my answer because nobody else did (not even Google)…
We have a customer who wants data from several of their Coordinate Measuring Machines (CMM’s). These CMM’s are legacy machines (~20 years old) that have been retrofit a a number of times with several different controller and other systems and hardware components. We did a bit of a science project on the machines and tapped into the machine network that as coordinating command and response traffic between the Controlling Computer, CMM controller, Head controller and probe and captured TCP packages moving around the network. We figured out how to decode the message payload and aggregated a huge list of commands and responses that we really could only guess at what it meant. After reading through page after page of manuals, reviewing very old posts on online forums, calling one of the manufacturers and obviously “Googling” everything i possibly could the only thing we came up with was it was something similar the “Leitz” protocol (which i never heard of…and google knew very little about…at least nothing helpful) but much of it was legacy Renishaw commands (used before the retrofit when the machine was using RS232). Anyway, nobody had a command list.
Ok, ChatGPT…I doubt you can help me with this one…
To summarize, i had to provide ChatGPT, who i’m going to now call “Chad”, with some context first. A friend of mine had been playing with “Chad” for weeks and told me that you can’t just outright ask a question and not provide the context or situation. So I talked to “Chad” like it was my expert low-level CMM communication protocol expert. I gave it the exact situation i was dealing with and what i was thinking the protocol was. Then i asked it to give me a summary of the the Renishaw RS232 communication protocol. To my surprise, it actually did. It didn’t give me what i needed (that came later), but it gave me a pretty amazing summary. See below:
Then i asked, “Can you give me a command list for the Leitz or Renishaw RS232 protocol”? “Chad” replied, something to the effect, that i should contact the Manufacturer….
Come on “Chad”, you don’t think I tried that already??
So I asked the question a bit differently and provided some examples of the messages we were seeing in the payload. And this is when…the world as i knew it changed. ChatGPT (I mean “Chad”) began listing off commands and definitions of a low level messaging protocol used to instruct and control a 20 year old Coordinate Measuring Machines controller, head and probe systems. I had been looking for this information for weeks and could barely find even a lead on what the protocol was. Somehow “Chad” had the exact information I had been looking for and it took me about 5 minutes to convince him to give it to me. See below:
And…
I still can’t believe this information was someplace in that AI model. What data did they use to train this thing? What else does it know? Does it know anything it really shouldn’t know?
I think the world may be on the verge of changing forever! This tool is going to save me so much time its unreal!
John Murphy
Leave a Reply