On November 30, 2022, OpenAI innocently presented a new product to the world This is the description “A model called ChatGPT that communicates in a conversational way.”
It’s no hyperbole to suggest that ChatGPT has subsequently transformed the worlds of business and technology, becoming massively popular – it’s still number one in Apple’s free app rankings – as well as acting as a catalyst for a flood of generative AI products.
It even made people suspicious of M Dash, which no chatbot would take from me.
Indeed, “Empire of AI” author Karen Howe argued in a recent interview with TechCrunch that OpenAI “has already become more powerful than any nation-state in the world” and is now “reshaping our geopolitics, all of our lives.”
More dramatic changes may be coming. Charlie Worzel wrote in the Atlantic That we now live in a “chatgpt-created world,” one that is “defined by a certain kind of undoing” and “forever waiting for a shoe to drop.”
“Younger generations feel this instability acutely as they prepare to graduate into a workforce that they are warned may not have a predictable career path,” Warzel said. “Older generations are also told that the future may be unknown, that the marketable skills they have acquired may not be relevant.”
Of course, others feel more optimistic about an AI-centric future and are actually positioned to profit handsomely from it. But according to Warzel, AI boosters and investors are waiting along with everyone else — waiting to see if their bets pay off, but waiting “because one of the defining characteristics of generative AI, according to true believers, is that it’s never in its final form.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg is more focused How ChatGPT Changed the Stock Market. The most obvious winner by far is Nvidia, whose stock is up 979% since the chatbot’s launch. But AI fever has also spurred other big tech companies, with the S&P 500’s seven most valuable companies — Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Broadcom — all linked to technology, and accounting for nearly half of the benchmark’s 64% increase since GPT’s launch.
This made for a more top-heavy market. The S&P 500 is weighted by market capitalization, and those same seven companies now account for 35% of the weighting, up from about 20% three years ago.
How long will this increase last? With the notable exception of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, it has become increasingly common for AI executives to admit that we may be in a bubble (or if you prefer, a “mania”).
One loses a tremendous amount of money in AI,” said the OpenAI CEO. Sam Altman at a dinner with reporters in August.
Similarly, Sierra CEO and OpenAI board chair Brett Taylor agreed that we are “in a bubble” that he compared to the dot-com boom of the late ’90s. While individual companies may fail, he predicted, “AI will transform the economy and I think it will create a huge amount of economic value in the future, just like the Internet.
In another three years – or less – we’ll find out if that optimism was justified.