ChatGPT’s $8 Trillion Birthday Gift to Big Tech
Two years in, generative AI’s value to the world is still unclear. But these charts show that it’s been a bonanza for the largest tech firms.
Life-changing technology?
Source: Bloomberg
Saturday marks two years since OpenAI posted an oddly named widget called ChatGPT to the web. Its staffers placed bets on how many users it would accumulate, the highest estimate being 100,000. How wrong they were.
ChatGPT quickly became the fastest-growing app in history, with about 200 million active users today. When it first came out, social media was ablaze with examples of how this fluent little text box was a leap ahead of Amazon Inc.’s Alexa or Apple Inc.’s Siri. It could write poems and high school essays. It would probably reshape Hollywood and the education system. Some of that has come to pass, with schools rethinking how they assign homework, for instance, while its impact on other areas of life and business is still an open question.