Happy birthday, ChatGPT! Has any three-year-old ever changed the world quite so much? Within five days of its release on this day in 2022, a million people had tried it; within two months, 100 million, making it the fastest-ever mass adoption of a consumer product. ChatGPT introduced the world to generative artificial intelligence (AI), its parent company, OpenAI, and young chief executive Sam Altman – now so ubiquitous it seems impossible that they were unfamiliar such a short time ago.
ChatGPT’s popularity made Google accelerate launching its similar efforts, revitalised Microsoft (which integrated Open AI’s models into Bing and Office), inspired an AI start-up boom and an unprecedented surge in capital investment that is transforming the chip making, data centre, construction and electricity industries – and possibly inflating a stock market bubble. And not just stock – OpenAI, which has a weak balance sheet compared with its rivals, is encouraging a surge in potentially risky AI-related borrowing by its business partners. “Leveraging other companies’ balance sheets”, as Altman puts it.
Financial risk, and whether (or when) investment will translate into higher profits, is just one of many AI-related topics about which debate has only intensified in the past three years. Does the technology even work well, given its seemingly unfixable habit of making things up (“hallucinating”)? Will AI increase human potential, or leave us mostly as useless, jobless bystanders? Will it unleash a golden era of progress or drive humanity towards extinction?
Three years is long enough to change the world but too short to know the consequences. If all goes well, history may count 30 November 2022 as the start of a glorious Age of Intelligence. If AI disappoints, or worse, we may need another name. How about the Great Hallucination?
Photograph by Florian Gaertner/Photothek via Getty Images