The Unprecedented Rise
OpenAI launched ChatGPT to the public on November 30, 2022.
A lot of tech launches happen and then die away. Excitement raises for just a week or so, then people forget. But ChatGPT was something else.
It took Facebook five days to reach 1 million users. Two months later and it reached 100 million users-The fastes consumer app to ever reach so many. Nothing had anything of that sort-not Facebook, not Instagram, not TikTok.
But raw number of users doesn’t really show the entire picture. The more intriguing question is: what has really changed?
Who Could Use AI Before and After
The first thing that changed was who could use AI. Prior to ChatGPT, AI was largely a behind-the-scenes feature in other applications. You were ‘using’ AI (not consciously) when Google was ordering your search results, when Netflix suggested a series, when Spotify was choosing what song to play next.
ChatGPT changed all of that. It became cheap and easy for someone sitting at their laptop, a grandmother who barely knew how to use a smartphone, to question an artificial intelligence system. They could have asked ChatGPT to suggest ways to improve their running speed.
A young child studying in Cairo could got ask it to explain a difficult chemistry concept.
A small business owner in Manila could have gotten an AI to write a marketing blurb for his new product.38
That democratization of AI is truly powerful. Like never before, everyday individuals who weren’t engineers or researchers could felt the power of AI systems.
What We Expect from Software Now
The second thing that have changed was the software’s expectation. Prior to ChatGPT, the software was just doing what you told it to do. Clicking buttons.
Filling forms.
Following menus. Software was dumb, you had to have a know-how about it to know how to get the result you want.
Post-ChatGPT, people came to expect that software to “get” them. They’ve come to expect that they should be able to describe what they want in plain English and the software will find a way to make it happen. That’s a radically different relationship with technology. And now that they’ve seen it, they don’t want to go back.
This is why you saw all of these tech companies freak out and try to put as much AI as they could into the products. Because the users now knew what to expect.
The Conversation About Work Becomes Real
The third area of transition was around work/chatGPT conversations. You cannot have a work chatGPT discussion for a few minutes without someone asking: is this going to steal my job? That was a topic that had existed even before chatGPT, but chatGPT made it real as opposed to a hypothetical.
Now it wasn’t hypothetical. Now you could go and test it. You could take a piece of writing you’ve done and see whether ChatGPT can do that other than.
You could give it a job task from your job and see whether it works.
For a lot of people, that was eyes on all sorts of things. Some people saw the output and thought “this will never replace me. Others saw it and thought “all right, we’ve got an issue here.”
What is more true, as is often the case, is somewhere in between these two. ChatGPT made transparent the remarkable capabilities of AI to take over certain mechanical, repetitive aspects of many types of work, but also revealed how difficult the uniquely human aspects of work judgment, relationships, creative flair, understanding 2009 to 2023 Archive. Keeps you ahead with expert insights on what matters.
The Investment Explosion
The fourth thing that changed was investment. ChatGPT literally was the starting gun for one of the largest investment booms in the history of technology. Billions of dollars were pouring into AI firms.
Every big tech firm launched or ramped up their own AI programs.
Even venture capitalists were pouring money into AI startups at an almost frantic rate.
That investment directly determines the pace of technological progress. The higher the investment, the more the researchers and computing resources; the more the experiments. The pace of AI progress since 2022 has been directly related to the investment spike generated by ChatGPT.
Two Years Later Where Are We?
Now, two years later where are we?
They’re significantly improved over what launched in 2022. They make a lot fewer mistakes. They understand context more effectively.
They’re multimodal-working with images, documents, and voice.
They can assist with coding in ways that are revolutionizing software development. They’re on your phone. Embedded into search engines and productivity software.
But there are also real worries that have accumulated with capacity. Worry over disinformation the ability of AI to produce lifelike lies en masse. Worry over worker replacement elements of this are beginning to be seen in some sectors.
Worry over safety what will happen when these engines become more and more capable?
Worry over monopolisation a few firms controlling the key AI engines of the world.
None of these issues has been entirely addressed. They are the topics of lively discussions taking place in universities, governments, businesses, and dining rooms everywhere.
A Dividing Line in History
What we know for sure is that 30 November 2022 was a true turning point. A new dawn. The techno world and, for many, the work and communication world is indeed different now.
If it’s not different in some net positive way, it’s still being written. But it’s definitely different.
And for those of us who are watching the entire sport develop and some of us in it- that’s an incredible thing to get to see in our own lifetime.
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