CTO gets Real about new AI tools, and risks
ChatGPT is not hard to add to your site. The challenge comes in doing it the right way, so you don’t hurt your brand with “hallucinations.”
Key points:
- The Real Brokerage is launching Leo, a digital personal assistant for agents.
- Unlike ChatGPT, Leo has access to proprietary information.
- Zillow and Redfin unveiled new ChatGPT plugins, while Realtor’s AI-powered Dream Home creates a picture and finds listings to match.
Jumping on the ChatGPT bandwagon may be easier than you think — but if you do it without guardrails, it could take you right off a cliff.
Pritesh Damani, chief technology officer at The Real Brokerage, said "any engineer" can put ChatGPT on your website in just a few hours.
But that could be a huge mistake.
The No. 1 risk would be brand damage, Damani told a room full of industry leaders gathered this week for the T3 Leadership Summit in Naples, Florida. (Note: T3 Sixty and Real Estate News share a founder, Stefan Swanepoel.)
"I would not want to put our brand Real on top of a bot and just say hey, ask me anything. It could pull out stuff that makes no sense."
That's why Real's newly announced digital personal assistant, Leo, is actually not a ChatGPT product. But it is a GPT, built using proprietary data from Real's transaction management platform, reZEN.
Wait, what?
The ABCs of GPTs
Here's the deal: GPT stands for "generative pre-trained transformer." It's OK if you don't remember that, though you might lose at trivia. What's important to know is that GPT is "trained" by large collections of information to produce natural-sounding text.
ChatGPT is a type of GPT created specifically for conversations. It's trained by the internet, albeit with some curation, and prone to "hallucinations."
Both ChatGPT and GPT are types of artificial intelligence (AI) because they use machine learning to process and generate human-like language — something that once required actual human intelligence.
With Leo, a real estate agent can say "What's my commission from my last transaction?" or "Show me the contract I sent out two months ago" and get real-time answers derived from Real's own data — which ChatGPT does not have access to.
Meanwhile, Real gets fewer calls from agents and greater efficiency in a tight-margin business.
Zillow, Redfin and Realtor add new AI products
Zillow and Redfin both announced ChatGPT plugins this week, which will allow ChatGPT users with plugin access to find homes by describing them in conversational terms: "Show me a house with three bedrooms, a basement and a view of the mountain." Zillow previously unveiled a natural-language search feature for its mobile app.
Realtor.com's new AI-powered "Dream Home," meanwhile, will generate a picture based on your text description and show you homes that match it visually. Unlike Zillow and Redfin's plugins, it does not require a user to have any sort of direct engagement with ChatGPT.
If all this AI stuff feels like it's happening insanely fast, that's because it is.
ChatGPT only launched on Nov. 30, but it acquired more than a million users in a matter of days — and more than 100 million users by January.
"It's kind of a joke, but eight months ago, everybody was talking about NFTs, like everything in real estate needs to be an NFT, right? Now everyone is talking about ChatGPT," Damani said.
And while there is risk to using ChatGPT without knowing its limitations, it should be viewed not as a threat, but as a utility to make some things easier, Damani said.
"I truly believe the world will change meaningfully the same way Google Search changed the world meaningfully."