ChatGPT turns one: how OpenAI’s AI chatbot changed technology forever

There have been some before and after moments in the era of modern technology. Everything was one way, and then suddenly it was obvious that it would never be that way again. Netscape showed the world the Internet; Facebook made the Internet personal; The iPhone made it clear how the mobile era would take over. There are others – there’s a dating app moment somewhere, and Netflix starting to stream movies might also qualify – but not many.

ChatGPT, which OpenAI launched a year ago today, might have been the lowest-key game-changer ever. No one went on stage and announced that they had invented the future, and no one thought they were launching something that would make them rich. If we’ve learned anything in the last 12 months, it’s that no one (not OpenAI’s competitors, not the public using the technology, not even the platform’s creators) thought ChatGPT would become the fastest-growing consumer technology in the history. And in retrospect, the fact that no one saw ChatGPT coming could be exactly the reason why everything has seemingly changed.

In the year since ChatGPT launched, it has brought changes to virtually every corner of the tech industry. In a year marked by a huge drop in venture capital investment, seemingly any company with “ai” in its pitch is capable of raising money: $17.9 billion in the third quarter of this year alone. ai-funding-soars-to-17-9-billion-as-the-rest-of-tech-slumps?sref=ExbtjcSG#xj4y7vzkg”>according to the proposal bookand some of the industry’s biggest venture capital firms are raising huge funds just to keep pouring money into ai.

Some companies already appear to be at the head of the pack: Anthropic is emerging as one of OpenAI’s best and most well-funded competitors, Midjourney’s image-generating ai is improving at a remarkable pace, and even this week Pika appeared from nowhere with a really awesome ai video tool. But whether you like note-taking apps, audio mixing tools, or easy ways to summarize meetings, books, or legal documents, something new and cool is released practically every day.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the tech industry, ai has consumed the largest companies on the planet. Microsoft, an OpenAI partner and investor, bet big on an ai-powered Bing and at the same time incorporated its ai “copilots” into Office, Windows, Azure and more. Google, which invented much of the foundational technology that is now suddenly everywhere, rushed to launch Bard and Search Generative Experience, and incorporated Duet ai into its own workplace products. ai was the centerpiece of Amazon’s announcements this year, from LLM-powered Alexa to a million new ai tools for AWS customers. Meta now sees ai as a critical part of its future, perhaps even more so than the metaverse. ai hardware made Nvidia one of the most valuable companies in the world. Even Apple, which has been the least aggressive of the tech giants, has started to talk more about its ai efforts, and could have big plans for Siri coming soon. I could move on. Call it a boom, call it a bubble, but it’s been a long time since the entire tech world was so obsessed with one thing.

However, make no mistake: ChatGPT is the biggest winner of the ChatGPT revolution. It doesn’t look like much (its new audio and picture features are cool, but for the most part it’s still just a crudely designed chat interface) and it’s been plagued with reliability issues, but that hasn’t stopped its momentum. It had a million users in five days, 100 million in just two months, and now boasts of having 100 million every week.

ChatGPT and the underlying model have also quickly become a billion-dollar business for OpenAI. It achieved something almost impossible: it is both a data provider, making money from other companies that want to build things on GPT models, and a successful consumer app in its own right. People pay $20 a month to use ChatGPT, while other companies pay much more to use their models – OpenAI makes them come and go.

You can hardly click on a link on the Internet anymore without facing confident predictions about how ai will change everything. It can write your emails for you! It’s going to invade the Internet with generated garbage! You can write code! It will write malware that will ruin everything! He can make Pixar movies! You’ll be stuck in the uncanny valley forever! You’ll never have a job again! You never need a job again! ai will save us! ai will kill us!

It’s worth stopping here for a second to point out that, in reality, most of this technology still isn’t very good. Large language models “hallucinate,” which is a nice way of saying that they make things up all the time. If you look at an ai image for more than two seconds, you can always tell it was generated. The emails he writes for you always have that machine-made vibe. ai systems are not smarter than humans, or more creative, or anything like that. Is it remarkable that they are as good as they are? Sure! But so far ai is shaping up to be self-driving cars: It improved a lot faster than anyone thought, and it’s going to take a lot of work to get good enough to be everywhere. There is absolutely no reason, at this point, to think that we are going to encounter any kind of superhuman Artificial General Intelligence anytime soon. If ever.

However, this is the point where “no one saw this coming” gets complicated. The ai ​​may not be finished yet, but it’s already better than most people expected. And even in recent weeks, OpenAI has been torn in two by the speed with which ChatGPT has grown and OpenAI has taken steps to monetize it with an app store and other tools. CEO Sam Altman was briefly ousted, for reasons we still don’t exactly know: Was it a power play between board members and executives, the result of a disagreement over security, or something else entirely?

That drama was strange and high-stakes, and ultimately perhaps unrelated to the larger issue. So let’s get back to that broader question: What are we really building here?? Because all of this has happened so quickly, and because the effects of ai are potentially so far-reaching, 2023 has forced everyone to catch up with what it all means.

OpenAI’s original mission statement was to “advance digital intelligence in a way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by the need to generate financial return.” Which is vague, but looks good! It is also easy to tell when there is no financial return, and much more difficult when analysts estimate that the total addressable market is bitcoin-and-crypto-mogul-reveals-wild-chatgpt-plan/?sh=4eadb6b01529″>more than a billion dollars.

Across technology and around the world, many people are reflecting on this same tension. If you are Google CEO Sundar Pichai and you have already spent ai-is-more-important-than-fire-electricity.html”>five years without irony ai-bard-profound-tech-human-history-2023-4″>saying that ai is “deeper than electricity or fire,” is it your responsibility to maximize its value for shareholders or for humanity? There isn’t much evidence to show that you can do both at the same time, and historically, shareholders tend to win. If ai is going to change everything, literally everything, can it do so within the technology industry and economy as we know it? Is the ai ​​we need the same as the ai ​​that makes more money?

We definitely seem to like being able to write business emails more quickly and we like being able to ask Excel to “convert this to a bar chart” instead of digging through menus. We like to be able to code by simply telling ChatGPT what we want our application to do. But do we want ai-generated, SEO-optimized news to take over the posts we used to love? Do we want ai robots that act like real-life characters and become anthropomorphized companions in our lives? Should we think of ai more as a tool or a collaborator? If an ai tool can be trained to create the exact song, movie, image or story I want right now, is that art or dystopia? Even as we begin to answer those questions, ai technology seems to always be one step and one cultural revolution ahead.

At the same time, there have been lawsuits accusing ai companies of stealing artists’ work, to which several US judges have said, essentially: our existing copyright laws simply don’t know what to do with ai. absolutely. Lawmakers have been concerned about ai safety, and President Joe Biden signed a fairly generic executive order directing agencies to create safety standards and companies to do good, not evil. It can be argued that the ai ​​revolution was built on immoral and/or illegal foundations, and yet the creators of these models and companies confidently continue forward with their plans, while saying that it is impossible and contrary to progress to stop them. or slow them down.

This all gets really heady real quick, I know. And the truth is, no one knows where all of this will be even 12 months from now, especially the people who make the loudest predictions. All you have to do is look at the recent hype cycles (the blockchain, the metaverse, and many others) for evidence that things usually don’t turn out the way we think. But there’s so much momentum behind the ai ​​revolution, and so many companies have invested deeply in its future, that it’s hard to imagine GPTs following the same path as NFTs.

If anything, the next 12 months of the ai ​​industry will move even faster than the last 12. OpenAI’s technology has improved dramatically since the first release of ChatGPT, as has that of its competitors. And the entire industry has had a year to think about all the places ai could be useful in our lives and profitable in its products. There will be startups building ai chips, ai data centers, and the rest of the massive infrastructure needed to make an LLM operate at speed and scale. We’re going to get a slew of ai-focused devices, like the Humane ai Pin, as companies try to figure out whether chatbots can take us into the post-smartphone era. (Though, personally, I wouldn’t bet against screens anytime soon.)

We still don’t know if ai will end up changing the world like the Internet, social networks and smartphones did. Those things weren’t just technological leaps: they actually reorganized our lives in fundamental and irreversible ways. If the final form of ai is “my computer writes some of my emails for me,” ai won’t be on that list. But there are a lot of smart people and trillions of dollars betting that this is the beginning of the ai ​​story, not the end. If they are right, the day OpenAI released its “research preview” of ChatGPT will be much more than a product launch forever. It will be the day the world changes and we didn’t even see it coming.