ChatGPT was launched three years ago today

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI introduced a new product to the world, innocuously describing it as “a model called ChatGPT that interacts in a conversational way.”

It’s no exaggeration to suggest that ChatGPT has transformed the worlds of business and technology, becoming hugely popular — it remains number one in Apple’s free app rankings today — while also serving as a catalyst for a flood of generative AI products.

It even made people question the em police, which no chat show would ever take from me.

In fact, Karen Howe, author of AI Empire, claimed in a recent interview with TechCrunch that open AI “has already become more powerful than almost any nation-state in the world,” and is now “reordering our geopolitics, and our entire lives.”

There may be more dramatic changes in the future. Charlie Warzel writes in The Atlantic that we now live in “the world built by ChatGPT,” which is “defined by a certain kind of fragility” and “always waiting for the shoe to drop.”

“Younger generations feel acutely unsettled as they prepare to graduate into a workforce in which they are warned that there may not be a predictable path to a career,” Warzel said. “Older generations are also being told that the future may be unknown, and that the marketable skills you have honed may no longer be relevant.”

Of course, others are more optimistic about an AI-centric future and are already in a position to benefit greatly from it. But in Warzel’s telling, AI backers and investors are waiting along with everyone else — waiting to see if their bets will pay off, but also waiting “because the defining characteristic of generative AI, according to its true believers, is that it never reaches its final form.”

Meanwhile, Bloomberg took a more focused look at how ChatGPT will transform the stock market. The most obvious winner so far is Nvidia, whose shares have risen 979% since the launch of the chatbot. But the AI ​​fever has also boosted other big tech companies, with the seven most valuable companies on the S&P 500 — NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Broadcom — tied to the technology, and their collective growth represents nearly half of the benchmark 64% increase since ChatGPT’s launch.

This has led to a heavier market. The S&P 500 is weighted based on market capitalization, and these same seven companies now account for 35% of the weighting, compared to about 20% three years ago.

How long will this growth continue? With the notable exception of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, it is becoming increasingly common for AI executives to admit that we may be in a bubble (or if you prefer, a “mania”).

“Someone is going to lose a tremendous amount of money in AI,” Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said in August, during a dinner with reporters.

Likewise, Brett Taylor, CEO of Sierra and Chairman of OpenAI, agreed that “we are in a bubble” and compared it to the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. He predicted that while individual companies may fail, “AI will change the economy, and I believe that, like the Internet, it will create enormous amounts of economic value in the future.”

In another three years – or less – we may know whether this optimism is justified.