ChatGPT Takes the World by Storm

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Intro

It’s been quite a while since a new technological advancement created a buzz like ChatGPT. I am sure you have seen a bunch about it or even tried it yourself. For those of you who do not know, I will quickly summarize what this is. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence tool created by OpenAI. It stands for Generative Pre-Training Transformer and it essentially mimics human-like conversation by taking large amounts of data and learning, to generate a response. The topic is extremely hot button, so assuming you don’t live under a rock, I will avoid boring you with the basics. Instead, let’s look at this tool as a strategic inflection point for the tech industry. With that being said, by the end of this I aim to answer two key questions. How does this change the tech industry? And in what ways does ChatGPT (the future of AI as a whole) shift the dynamic of human evolution?

Microsoft Looks to Buy the “Google Killer”

The advent of ChatGPT serves as a monumental landmark in the progression of artificial intelligence. For that reason, it is no surprise that most major tech companies will be making a push to keep up. In fact, Microsoft has shown interest in a $10 billion investment in OpenAI. What does this mean? Well, if Microsoft was to acquire this technology for their own use, it becomes an even bigger threat to Google. Microsoft has their search engine, Bing, which was pretty quickly overshadowed by Google. However, ChatGPT’s tech can rewrite this script pretty easily. Before getting too excited, it is important to look back at Google’s history with AI. They actually bought a London-based AI startup called DeepMind all the way back in 2014. Therefore, it is unfair to assume that Google is “behind” in this race. Especially since we cannot see behind the scenes. But what we can say for sure is that this advancement puts pressure on ALL tech companies, a true strategic inflection point for the industry. Meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and many others are posed with a potentially pivotal decision for their companies future. Adapt or fall behind. It is easy to get caught riding the hype train so let’s zoom out for a second. Although ChatGPT appears to be impressive, like any first of its kind technology, there is inherently going to be flaws. Take it from the Founder of OpenAI himself, Sam Altman tweets:

The point is, we are still early. Early, but far enough along where this becomes a catalyst for the tech industry to start switching gears. For the mainstream consumer, artificial intelligence was a futuristic thought that we may see one day. ChatGPT is the holy shit moment and the realization that it’s now more than just an idea. In the grand scheme of things, AI’s impact on the tech industry will be minuscule in comparison to it’s effect on human evolution.

A Look into the Future

I won’t sit here and act like I know exactly how ChatGPT and AI will effect the future because nobody does. In his book Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari states “People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant in history is that everything changes.” AI gets a fairly mixed reputation from humans. Some think that it will change the world for the better. Others think it will destroy or replace humanity completely. I would say both are fair arguments. If the progression continues as it is right now, there are some things that are more than likely to happen. While this is pure speculation, there are some assumptions that at least make sense.

Jobs are about to Change

If you are a content creator, marketer, or writer, there is a good chance that you have already used ChatGPT to help create work. For that reason, we might not be far off from building entire business’s using this technology. You ask ChatGPT to write the code for a website you want to build. Then you prompt it to write scripts for marketing. You have it do the math for the financial portion. Keep this up and you have yourself a fully functioning business. It is obviously more complex than that, but certainly not out of the realm of possibility. The first jobs to be replaced are probably customer service, data entry, receptionist, things that do not require a true human element. Customer Service is a job that sucks for most people as it is so I don’t see anyone having issues with this. Having a trained language model answer to angry customers seems like a pretty good alternative. As we know, when a new technology comes along to replace jobs, new ones are created. The difficult part of AI is we are not quite sure how many jobs it will actually replace. In the 1700s, the Spinning Jenny was created. This replaced manual labor, however created new jobs in the building of the machine itself. It seems like some level of basic software developers may be replaced with AI, but that may create the need for a prompt engineer. A new job that has someone ask ChatGPT the right questions in order to get the most optimal responses. Like I said, the best anyone can do is speculate, study the past, and realize change in inevitable.

Will Art be Replaced?

Art is a tough topic regarding AI. OpenAI already has an image generator called Dall-E. The premise is, give a description of an image you want it to create and it will do it. The problem is, I have tried it and it is not great. There is still a very long way to go before getting anywhere near the best human art. It is hard to recreate the human element of art with a machine.

The Rights to Data

This is where things get weird. Who has the rights to the data sets that these AI models use? That is the big question. The best way for ChatGPT to approach this is links to the source that the info is coming from. If someone asks for the best burger restaurants in town, there should be a direct link the review pages on Yelp. There is way too much data out there to assign rights to all of it. I can see this becoming the next big conflict between these major tech companies as they will all be trying to out compete each other.

You can really make yourself crazy thinking about the future in relation to AI. It is times like these where you like to believe there is a real element of good in humanity and that we will use this to make the world a better place instead of destroy it. Unfortunately, with all good comes evil and of course the possibility that humans turn this into a major liability. Only time will tell.

Weekly Book/Podcast Recommendations:

• Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari

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