ChatGPT Is Already Affecting How Real Estate Business Is Done
ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence system that provides answers in sentences rather than search results, has seemingly been sweeping across society at breakneck speed since it launched in November.
Now its sweep is being felt in commercial real estate.
Developed by pseudo-nonprofit OpenAI, ChatGPT has already found applications in the real estate industry as a time-saving substitute for basic informational exchanges, The Real Deal and Insider report. But its use could spread with stunning rapidity if a newly announced investment from Microsoft delivers its promised results.
The computing giant on Monday announced a multibillion-dollar investment into OpenAI for the continued evolution and expansion of ChatGPT. The total figure will reach $10B over a period of multiple years, Bloomberg reports.
The huge outlay was announced days after Microsoft laid off 10,000 workers and announced a plan to spend $1.2B pulling back from real estate investments.
Microsoft invested more than $1B in OpenAI over multiple fundraising rounds in 2019 and 2021, and the organization already uses Microsoft's Azure cloud computing network to power the ChatGPT engine. The text responses it produces can resemble human writing with varying degrees of success, depending on subject matter and the phrasing of the question, but Miami Real Estate Group founder Andres Asion has already used it to quickly answer questions about the math of interest rates, TRD reports.
Less than a month before it announced its new investment into OpenAI, Microsoft released a suite of OpenAI-powered services for Azure users, Bloomberg reports. The Azure OpenAI Service has been available to a limited subset of Azure customers since 2021. Also this month, OpenAI debuted a paid tier of its bot called ChatGPT Professional, Tech Crunch reports.
The integration of ChatGPT and similar services into Azure means that companies running their own business software on Microsoft's cloud could integrate bots and AI into their websites and digital infrastructure, Bloomberg reports.
That means the integration of ChatGPT into real estate listing sites or at other intersections of real estate and the internet now looks less like a possibility and more like an inevitability.
