ChatGPT, at Age Two - Marcus on AI
ChatGPT blew the world away two years ago this week, and has received more press — and more investment - than anything else in the history of AI. ChatGPT is undeniably fun to play with. The pace of its spread has been incredible, with hundreds of millions of people trying it out.
But a lot of of theories about how ChatGPT would be used in practice have fizzled out. Remember how ChatGPT was gonna take over web search and wipe out Google? Two years later Google’s search share hasn’t diminished all that much. High school kids are still using ChatGPT to write term papers, but a lot of Fortune 500 companies are somewhat underwhelmed by the real world results they are getting.
There has been a ton of experimentation, but relatively few well-documented success stories, and some fairly negative stories like a recent one at Business Insider on GPT-powered CoPilot, headlined “Microsoft is betting big on AI. Company insiders have serious doubts”, quoting a source there as saying “I really feel like I'm living in a group delusion here at Microsoft … [the company touts that] AI is going to revolutionize everything … but the support isn't there for AI to do 75% of what Microsoft claims it'll do.”
As long time readers will know, I commented somewhat negatively on ChatGPT, in this Substack, within days of its release, and soon thereafter in a January 2023 podcast with Ezra Klein. Klein, to his credit, was one of the first in the major media to recognize out loud that all was not entirely roses.
