How GPT-4 is Going to Change Publishing

Heads up to all authors!

There are thousands of people scrambling to take advantage of large language models this week. The one that caught my attention was Morgan Stanley’s announcement that they were partnering with OpenAI to enhance their wealth management services.

Morgan Stanley Wealth Management will leverage OpenAI’s technology to access, process and synthesize content to assimilate MSWM’s own expansive range of intellectual capital in the form of insights into companies, sectors, asset classes, capital markets, and regions around the world.

How can a giant operation like Morgan Stanley be so nimble? ChatGPT only came out last November. The answer is that leveraging OpenAI is easy and producing something useful, even mind boggling, is almost trivial.

Now imagine you are a publisher of a lot of content, say a large book publisher. How can you take advantage of an AI that has purportedly read all of your books and every other book ever published?

Simple, embed all the text from each book in a vector database with the help of OpenAI. Then allow users to interact with the content of the book by asking it questions. It is so simple to do that it took me 15 minutes to upload Security Yearbook 2022 and create a chatbot that knows just about everything I know about the cybersecurity industry. You can try it yourself from the product page.

Mind blowing. Imagine a chat bot for every college text book you ever bought. Every history book, math book, or poetry book.

I predict that book publishers will start doing this immediatly with their entire catalogs. Which one will be the first to announce a partnership with OpenAI? Which newspaper will finally break the barrier and use their information to create a business model that does not rely on paywalls and advertising?

If you are a self published author, you can do this today. You can sell annual subscriptions to your chatbots. Or do what I just did above to sell more books. :-)

You could argue that Gutenberg had a bigger impact on the world of information, but in our lifetimes this is the biggest.