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ChatGPT Is Having a Thomas Edison Moment
Why breakthrough technologies need to be accessible
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.
