There have been a few before-and-after instances throughout the age of contemporary technology. Everything was one way, and suddenly, it became clear that things would never be the same. The internet was introduced to the world by Netscape, made personal by Facebook, and made evident by the iPhone that the mobile era was about to arrive. There are a few more, but not many—there’s a dating app moment somewhere, and Netflix’s recent movie streaming may also qualify.
Today, OpenAI released ChatGPT one year ago, which may have been the most understated game-changer ever. No one believed they were launching the item that would make them wealthy, and no one stood up on stage and declared they had developed the future. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the past 12 months, nobody anticipated ChatGPT would become the fastest-growing consumer technology in history. This includes the platform’s designers, OpenAI’s competitors, and the general tech-using public. Looking back, ChatGPT’s unexpected success may be why it seems to have transformed everything.
Since its inception a year ago, ChatGPT has altered almost every aspect of the technology sector. Any company that includes the word “AI” in its pitch deck seems to be able to raise money this year that has otherwise seen a sharp decline in venture capital investment. According to Pitchbook, the third quarter of this year alone brought in $17.9 billion, and some of the largest VC firms in the business are raising sizable sums of money simply to keep investing in AI.
ChatGPT is the biggest winner of the ChatGPT revolution
Several businesses already seem to be leading the pack: Anthropic is emerging as one of OpenAI’s strongest and most well-funded rivals; Midjourney’s AI for creating images is developing at an astounding rate; and just this past week, Pika unexpectedly surfaced with an incredibly powerful AI video tool. But regardless of your preference for note-taking applications, audio mixing tools, or simple methods for summarising meetings, novels, or legal papers, something new and interesting is released almost daily.
Conversely, at the other extreme of the technology sector, artificial intelligence has engulfed the largest corporations globally. Microsoft, an investor and partner in OpenAI, made a significant wager on an AI-driven Bing and integrated its AI “Copilots” into Office, Windows, Azure, and other platforms. Having developed most of the underlying technology that is suddenly ubiquitous, Google hurried to introduce Bard and the Search Generative Experience, including Duet AI, into its office products. This year, artificial intelligence (AI) dominated Amazon’s offerings, including a million new AI products for AWS users and the LLM-powered Alexa. Meta now sees AI as even more important to the company than the metaverse. Thanks to its AI hardware, Nvidia is among the world’s most valuable firms. Even Apple, the tech titan with the least aggressive movement, has started to talk more about its AI work and may soon have huge ambitions for Siri. I could go on forever. Call it a bubble or a boom, but the tech industry hasn’t been this fixated on one item in a long time.
But there’s no denying that ChatGPT is the largest beneficiary of the ChatGPT revolution. Stability problems have beset it, and it doesn’t seem like much. Its new audio and visual features are cool, but it’s a crudely built chat interface. That hasn’t stopped its momentum. It boasts of having 100 million users in just two months, a million users in five days, and a million users weekly.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its underlying business model have grown rapidly to become billion-dollar ventures. It accomplished an almost unthinkable feat by becoming a popular consumer app and a data provider, charging other companies to create products on top of GPT models. While ChatGPT costs $20 per month to use, other businesses must pay much more to use its models; OpenAI is what makes them available.
Nowadays, browsing the internet or clicking on a link is nearly impossible without encountering optimistic forecasts about how artificial intelligence (AI) could transform the world. It is capable of writing emails for you! The internet will be inundated with created garbage! It is capable of writing code! It is going to build malware that destroys the world! It can produce Pixar films! It will be eternally trapped in the uncanny valley! You will never work again! You won’t ever need employment again! AI will come to our rescue! AI is going to destroy us!
Here, it’s important to take a moment to acknowledge that most of this technology is still far from perfect. Extensive language models “hallucinate,” which is a polite way of stating they constantly invent things. If you stare at it for over two seconds, you can always know an AI image was generated. It always seems like it was written by a computer when it composes emails for you. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are not inherently more creative or intelligent than humans. Do they stand out for being this good? Yes, of course! However, AI is now developing similarly to self-driving cars, becoming rather advanced and faster than anyone anticipated. It will require much work to reach a point where it is widely used. We have no reason to believe that we will achieve superhuman Artificial General Intelligence anytime soon at this moment. If at all.
But this is where the phrase “nobody saw this coming” becomes problematic. Even if AI isn’t quite there yet, it performs better than most anticipated. Furthermore, OpenAI has been completely overwhelmed by ChatGPT’s growth in recent weeks, and it has moved to monetise the platform with an app store and other tools.
Everyone must now catch up on What It All Means as of 2023.
That drama was peculiar, intense, and possibly unrelated to the main issue at the end. Now, let’s return to the general query: what are we genuinely creating here? 2023 has forced everyone to catch up on What It All Means since things have happened so quickly, and AI has such broad potential consequences.
“Advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return” was the original mission statement of OpenAI. Which seems wonderful, but it’s ambiguous! It’s also simple to say when there is no financial gain but considerably more difficult to state when analysts project that your entire addressable market is worth trillions of dollars.
Many others are considering this same tension in the tech industry and worldwide. Is it your duty as Google CEO Sundar Pichai to optimise AI’s value for humanity or shareholders, given that you have spent the last five years cynically declaring that it is “more profound than electricity or fire”? Historical data suggests that stockholders typically come out on top, but there isn’t much proof that you can accomplish both simultaneously. If AI is going to revolutionise everything, I mean everything, is it possible to do so inside the current tech sector and economy? Is the AI that generates the most money the same as the AI we need?
Is it your duty to optimise AI’s worth for humanity or shareholders?
We appear to enjoy asking Excel to “make this into a bar graph” rather than having to navigate menus, and we enjoy being able to compose business emails more quickly. We enjoy that we can write code by just telling ChatGPT what we need our application to accomplish. But do we want our favourite magazines replaced with AI-generated, SEO-optimized news stories? Do we want artificial intelligence (AI) bots to behave like actual people and transform into anthropomorphic friends? Should AI be viewed more as a collaborator or as a tool? Is it art or dystopia if an AI tool can be trained to produce the precise song, movie, image, or story I want now? AI technology seems always to be one step and one cultural revolution ahead of us, even as we begin to address those questions.
In response to lawsuits alleging AI corporations of stealing artists’ works, several US judges have essentially stated that our current copyright rules regarding AI are completely outdated. Lawmakers have wrung their hands regarding AI safety, and President Joe Biden issued a somewhat sweeping executive order telling agencies to develop safety guidelines and directing businesses to act morally rather than immorally. It can be argued that the AI revolution was founded on unethical and unlawful principles. Still, the people who developed these models and the companies behind them persist in their bold goals, claiming that any attempt to halt or slow them down would be counterproductive to advancement.
I know; this stuff gets heady very quickly. The truth is that nobody, including the most vocal forecasters, has any idea where any of this will stand even a year from now. The blockchain, the metaverse, and many other recent hype cycles are just a few examples of how things don’t always work out how we want them to. However, the AI revolution has so much momentum and so many businesses riding on it that it’s difficult to see GPTs becoming extinct, like NFTs.
The AI sector will likely advance even more quickly in the upcoming year than in the previous one. OpenAI’s and its competitors’ technologies have advanced significantly since ChatGPT’s initial release. Additionally, the entire industry has had a year to consider all the potential applications of artificial intelligence in our daily lives and commercial products. AI chips, AI data centres, and the remaining substantial infrastructure needed to enable an LLM to operate quickly and efficiently will be constructed by new businesses. Many AI-focused devices, such as the Humane AI Pin, will be released as businesses attempt to determine whether chatbots can usher in a day without smartphones. (However, I wouldn’t wager against screens shortly.)
Whether AI will ultimately transform the world like social media, the internet, and smartphones did is still up in the air. These were not merely technological advances; they fundamentally and irrevocably changed how we lived. AI won’t make the list if the ultimate application of the technology is “my computer writes some of my emails for me.” However, trillions of dollars and many intelligent people believe this is just the beginning of the AI story, not the end. If they are correct, the day OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT’s “research preview” will go down in history as much more than a historic product launch. That will be the day that everything changed, and we were completely unprepared for it.