ChatGPT Is on the Horizon: Could a Large Language Model Be All We Need for Intelligent Transportation?

ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is one of the milestone large language models (LLMs) with 6 billion parameters. ChatGPT has demonstrated the impressive language understanding capability of LLM, particularly in generating conversational response. As LLMs start to gain more attention in various research or engineering domains, it is time to envision how LLM may revolutionize the way we approach intelligent transportation systems. This paper explores the future applications of LLM in addressing key transportation problems. By leveraging LLM with cross-modal encoder, an intelligent system can also process traffic data from different modalities and execute transportation operations through an LLM. We present and validate these potential transportation applications equipped by LLM. To further demonstrate this potential, we also provide a concrete smartphone-based crash report auto-generation and analysis framework as a use case. Despite the potential benefits, challenges related to data privacy, data quality, and model bias must be considered. Overall, the use of LLM in intelligent transport systems holds promise for more efficient, intelligent, and sustainable transportation systems that further improve daily life around the world.