ChatGPT Is Having a Thomas Edison Moment
Why breakthrough technologies need to be accessible
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ChatGPT is blowing up. Twitter is inundated with screenshots of the app, coding sites like Stack Overflow are already banning answers produced with it, and over 1 million people have played with it. It’s a sensation.
As a professional AI researcher, I wouldn’t have called that. ChatGPT is trained specifically to act as a chat bot, but fundamentally it’s using the same GPT-3 technology that’s been available for over two years now.
What ChatGPT 3 demonstrates — moreso than impressive technology — is the crucial role that access plays in making breakthroughs truly usable. By packaging GPT-3 in a way that normal people can use, OpenAI has finally made people sit up and realize the incredible power of today’s AI.
This is nothing new; we think of Thomas Edison as the inventor of the lightbulb, not because he actually invented it, but because he successfully brought it to market and turned it into something that normal people could understand.
That will be a trend in the AI industry going forward; the companies that make using AI as easy as possible will be the ones that thrive.
The Importance of Use Cases
Most of today’s impressive AI systems are built on massive language models. These language models are trained on, essentially, all of the text humans have created over the last 6,000+ years.
GPT-3 ate 8 billion pages of text, almost every book ever published, and all of Wikipedia. It spat out an AI system that exhibits properties of general intelligence and can do everything from writing sea shanties to solving coding problems.
None of that is new. I started beta testing GPT-3 in 2020, and the fundamentals of the system have been around for much longer than that.
Interestingly, tools like GPT-3 have been baked into all kinds of apps without anyone really knowing. Many of the AI writing assistants that writers here on this platform either fawn over or scream about are just fancy wrappers around GPT-3.
Likewise, lots of utilitarian text on the Internet — think summaries of a restaurant’s menu or little…
