There have been a handful of before-and-after moments in the modern technology era. Everything was one way, and then just like that, it was suddenly obvious it would never be like that again. Netscape showed the world the internet; Facebook made that internet personal; the iPhone made plain how the mobile era would take over. There are others \u2014 there\u2019s a dating-app moment in there somewhere, and Netflix starting to stream movies might qualify, too \u2014 but not many.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
ChatGPT, which OpenAI launched a year ago today<\/a>, might have been the lowest-key game-changer ever. Nobody took a stage and announced that they\u2019d invented the future, and nobody thought they were launching the thing that would make them rich. If we\u2019ve learned one thing in the last 12 months, it\u2019s that no one \u2014 not OpenAI\u2019s competitors, not the tech-using public, not even the platform\u2019s creators \u2014 thought ChatGPT would become the fastest-growing consumer technology in history<\/a>. And in retrospect, the fact that nobody saw ChatGPT coming might be exactly why it has seemingly changed everything.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In the year since ChatGPT launched, it has brought change to practically every corner of the technology industry<\/a>. In a year otherwise marked by huge decline in venture-capital investing, seemingly any company with \u201cAI\u201d in its pitch deck is able to raise money \u2014 $17.9 billion just in the third quarter of this year, according to Pitchbook<\/a>, and some of the industry\u2019s biggest VC firms are raising huge funds just to keep pouring money into AI.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A few companies already appear to be at the head of the pack: Anthropic is shaping up to be one of OpenAI\u2019s best and most well-funded competitors, Midjourney\u2019s<\/a> image-generating AI is improving at a remarkable pace, and even just this week Pika appeared out of nowhere<\/a> with a seriously impressive AI video tool. But whether you like note-taking apps, audio-mixing tools, or easy ways to summarize meetings or books or legal documents, there\u2019s something new and cool launching practically every day.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Meanwhile, all the way at the other end of the tech industry, AI has consumed the biggest companies on the planet. Microsoft, an OpenAI partner and investor, bet big on an AI-powered Bing while also bringing its AI \u201cCopilots<\/a>\u201d into Office, Windows, Azure, and more. Google, which invented a lot of the foundational technology that is now suddenly everywhere, scrambled to launch Bard and the Search Generative Experience, and built Duet AI<\/a> into its own workplace products. AI was the centerpiece of Amazon\u2019s announcements this year, from the LLM-powered Alexa to a million new AI tools for AWS customers. Meta now sees AI<\/a> as a critical part of its future, maybe even more so than the metaverse. AI hardware made Nvidia one of the most valuable companies on earth. Even Apple, which has moved the least aggressively of the tech giants, has begun to talk more about its AI efforts \u2014\u00a0and might have big plans for Siri<\/a> coming soon. I could keep going. Call it a boom, call it a bubble, but it\u2019s been a long time since the whole tech world was this obsessed with a single thing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Make no mistake, though: ChatGPT is the biggest winner of the ChatGPT revolution. It doesn\u2019t look like much \u2014 its new audio and image features are neat, but it\u2019s mostly still just a roughly designed chat interface \u2014 and it has been plagued by reliability issues, but that didn\u2019t stop its momentum. It had a million users in five days, 100 million after just two months, and now boasts of having 100 million every week.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n ChatGPT is the biggest winner of the ChatGPT revolution<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n ChatGPT, and the model underneath it, have also quickly become a billion-dollar business for OpenAI. It pulled off something almost impossible: it\u2019s both a data provider, making money from other businesses who want to build stuff on top of GPT models, and a hit consumer app in its own right. People pay $20 a month to use ChatGPT, while other companies pay lots more to use its models \u2014 OpenAI gets \u2018em coming and going.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You practically can\u2019t click a link on the internet anymore without being confronted by confident predictions about how AI will change everything. It can write your emails for you! It\u2019s going to overrun the internet with generated crap! It can write code! It will write malware that ruins everything! It can make Pixar movies! It\u2019s going to be stuck in the uncanny valley forever! You\u2019ll never have a job again! You\u2019ll never need<\/em> a job again! AI will save us! AI will kill us!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s worth pausing here for just a second to point out that, in reality, most of this technology is still not very good. Large language models \u201challucinate,\u201d which is a nice way of saying they make stuff up, all the time. If you look at an AI image for more than about two seconds, you can always tell it was generated. The emails it writes for you always have that machine-made vibe to them. AI systems are not smarter than humans, or more creative, or really anything. Is it remarkable that they\u2019re as good as they are? Sure! But AI so far is shaping up like self-driving cars \u2014 it got pretty good faster than anybody thought, and it\u2019s going to be a hell of a lot of work to get good enough to be everywhere. There is absolutely no reason, right now, to think that we\u2019re going to hit some kind of superhuman Artificial General Intelligence anytime soon. If ever.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This is the point where \u201cnobody saw this coming\u201d gets complicated, though. AI may not be finished yet, but it\u2019s already better than most people expected. And even in recent weeks, OpenAI has been ripped in two<\/a> by the speed with which ChatGPT has grown and OpenAI has moved to monetize it with an app store and other tools<\/a>. CEO Sam Altman was briefly forced out<\/a>, for reasons we still don\u2019t exactly know: was it a power play between board members and executives, the result of a disagreement over safety, or something else entirely?\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 2023 has forced everyone to play catch up on What It All Means<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n That drama was strange and high-stakes and ultimately maybe not related to the broader question. So let\u2019s get back to that broader question: what are we actually building here<\/em>? Because this has all happened so fast, and because the effects of AI are so potentially wide-ranging, 2023 has forced everyone to play catch up on What It All Means.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n OpenAI\u2019s original mission statement was to \u201cadvance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.\u201d Which is vague, but seems good! It\u2019s also easy to say when there\u2019s no financial return, and much harder when analysts estimate your total addressable market is more than a trillion dollars<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Across tech, and around the world, lots of folks are pondering this same tension. If you\u2019re Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and you\u2019ve now spent five years<\/a> unironically saying<\/a> that AI is \u201cmore profound than electricity or fire,\u201d is your responsibility to maximize its value for shareholders or for humanity? There\u2019s not a lot of evidence that shows you can do both at once, and historically speaking, shareholders tend to win. If AI is going to change everything \u2014\u00a0like, literally everything \u2014\u00a0can it do so inside the tech industry and economy we know? Is the AI we need the same thing as the AI that makes the most money?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Is your responsibility to maximize AI\u2019s value for shareholders or for humanity?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n We definitely seem to like being able to more quickly write business emails, and we like being able to ask Excel to \u201cmake this into a bar graph\u201d instead of hunting through menus. We like being able to code just by telling ChatGPT what we want our app to do. But do we want SEO-optimized, AI-generated news stories to take over publications we used to love? Do we want AI bots 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 \/ story I want right now, is that art or is that dystopia? Even as we start to answer those questions, AI tech seems to always stay one step and one cultural revolution ahead.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n