On November 30, 2022, OpenAI announced a new product to the world, innocuously describing it as a “conversational interaction model called ChatGPT.”
It is no exaggeration to suggest that ChatGPT has since transformed the business and technology world and has become extremely popular. ChatGPT is still #1 on Apple’s list of free apps. At the same time, it is also acting as a catalyst for a large number of generated AI products.
Chatbots will never take this away from me, so people have even started to doubt em dashes.
In fact, Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI, claimed in a recent interview with TechCrunch that OpenAI has “already grown more powerful than almost any nation-state in the world” and is currently “rewriting our entire geopolitics and our lives.”
More dramatic changes may occur in the future. Charlie Worzel wrote in The Atlantic that we now live in “a world that ChatGPT has built” that is “defined by a certain type of instability” and “forever waiting for the shoe to drop.”
“Young people are acutely aware of this instability as they prepare to graduate and enter the workforce, warned that career paths can be unpredictable,” Wurzel said. “Older generations are also being told that the future may be unrecognizable and that the marketable skills they have developed may be meaningless.”
Of course, there are others who are more optimistic about an AI-centric future, and who actually stand to benefit greatly from it. But AI boosters and investors, Worzel said, are waiting along with everyone else to see if their bets will pay off, but they’re also waiting because “the defining characteristic of generative AI, according to true believers, is that it’s never in its final form.”
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Meanwhile, Bloomberg took a more focused look at how ChatGPT has transformed the stock market. The clearest winner so far has been Nvidia, whose stock has increased 979% since the chatbot’s launch. But the AI fever is also energizing other Big Tech companies, with the seven most valuable companies in the S&P 500 – Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Broadcom – all tech-related, with their overall growth accounting for nearly half of the benchmark’s 64% increase since ChatGPT’s inception.
This created a more top-heavy market. The S&P 500 is weighted based on market capitalization, and the same seven companies 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 among AI executives to recognize that we may be in a bubble (or “mania”).
“Someone is going to lose a staggering amount of money in the AI space,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at a dinner with journalists in August.
Similarly, Bret Taylor, Sierra CEO and OpenAI board chairman, agreed that we are “in a bubble” and compared it to the dot-com boom of the late ’90s. Although individual companies may fail, “AI will transform the economy and, like the Internet, will create enormous economic value in the future,” he predicted.
We may find out in three more years, or maybe even sooner, whether that optimism is justified.
