When it was introduced, there was oodles of scepticism around ChatGPT. In the early days, the fledgling AI’s responses were limited to simple text generation and translation. This past week, OpenAI has been in the news for all the wrong reasons: Its board sacked its founder and CEO Sam Altman; only to be threatened with an employee mutiny; mediating efforts made by key investor Microsoft; and the saga ending with Altman being reinstated as CEO under a different board of directors.
But it’s also a key time for the company which celebrates the first anniversary of ChatGPT this week. Such has been the impact of ChatGPT that there isn’t a single tech company that isn’t talking about AI, doing something about AI or doesn’t have AI on its radar. But how did we get so far, so quickly?
When it was introduced, there was oodles of scepticism around ChatGPT. In the early days, the fledgling AI’s responses were limited to simple text generation and translation. It was used more as a novelty, a fun little toy you could chat with and get your questions answered. You marvelled at, criticised it for getting things wrong, brushed it off. One year down, however, ChatGPT has evolved into a sophisticated language model, capable of generating human-quality text in various creative formats, translating languages with fluency and delivering insightful and informative responses.
It has also delved into the world of coding, assisting programmers debugging code and even generating entire programs from scratch. One of the most significant advancements was the introduction of ChatGPT Plus, a premium subscription service. This was followed by the release of the GPT-4 model, which offered even better content and allowed images to be uploaded. As ChatGPT evolved, it also began to address some of its early limitations. Its understanding of complex topics improved, its responses became more nuanced, its ability to generate creative text became sophisticated.
Like it or not, generative AI is here to stay. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Apple (even though it meticulously avoids mentioning AI) are all investing billions of dollars in AI, and much of it is down to ChatGPT. But the one-year anniversary is also a time for us to reflect on where we are and what lies ahead. Can this be a ‘human replacement’?
It is, after all, only artificial intelligence, and will always require human intervention to succeed. Perhaps that’s why the debate around ethics and AI is an important one to have. ChatGPT isn’t the iPhone moment of this decade currently, but check in a few years later, and November 30, 2022, might just go down as a historic day in tech.
