Second of four parts
Artificial intelligence tools exploded in 2023 and put Big Tech on its heels. One AI maker rocketed into the business stratosphere with $1 trillion in market capitalization.
ChatGPT brought AI to Americans’ devices — sparking a boom in the development and use of generative AI tools that produce high-quality images, text, audio and video.
Google followed with its own offerings. Others got a new look from a very interested public.
GitHub, a software development platform, said it saw users creating twice as many generative AI projects through the first half of 2023 as compared to all of 2022. In its annual Octoverse report, GitHub said it has witnessed “exponential growth” in applications being created on top of AI models including ChatGPT to make digital assistants, mobile applications and other tools and bots.
ChatGPT reached its first 1 million users in just one week, surpassing Instagram as the quickest app to do so, according to a UBS report.
SEE ALSO: Hype and hazards: Artificial intelligence is suddenly very real
ChatGPT’s explosive growth represented the fastest ramp-up for any consumer internet app in the 20 years the investment bank has surveyed the internet market, a UBS analyst told Reuters.
ChatGPT’s emergence as the face of generative AI might have been shocking to someone surveying the AI playing field several years back.
How it happened is a story of chance and opportunity.
The Big Tech giants have been pursuing a public-facing language AI for years; Google was among those that seemed to have the inside track.
That is until software engineer Blake Lemoine went public in the fall of 2022 with concerns that the LaMDA was “sentient,” or capable of having feelings. Google disputed his claim and ousted him, but he said the blow-up delayed Google’s AI launch.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, swooped in with its first public prototype in November 2022.
SEE ALSO: Ex-Google engineer fired over claiming AI is sentient is now warning of doomsday scenarios
Between September 2022 and August 2023, it saw a 1.8 billion-visit gain in traffic, according to Writerbuddy.ai.
The company has pressed forward at a frantic pace under CEO Sam Altman’s leadership. Mr. Altman helped launch OpenAI in 2015 alongside tech mogul Elon Musk.
By 2023, Mr. Altman had become the face of generative AI, earning meetings with President Biden and White House staffers crafting an AI executive order, and time with senators seeking his input on new legislation.
Turmoil struck in November when OpenAI’s board, worried about the chaotic speed of advance and accusing him of not being candid, ousted Mr. Altman.
Little more than two weeks later, he was back and the board of directors was replaced. Microsoft and the AI startup’s investors reportedly applied pressure on OpenAI and engineered Mr. Altman’s return.
The chaos atop OpenAI has caused anxiety for AI fanatics from Silicon Valley to Washington, particularly those who have heeded the AI company’s warnings. OpenAI, after all, said in July it was assembling a team dedicated to preventing the technology from going rogue and ending humanity.
Now OpenAI’s emissaries are hard at work looking to restore people’s and governments’ confidence in their work.
Speaking at the GovAI Summit in December, OpenAI’s Lane Dilg told an audience littered with government officials that her team had a “wild ride” in November but accomplished a swift resolution that demonstrated OpenAI’s resilience.
“We are very eager to partner with you as part of our iterative deployment process, both to ensure that the work we are doing across our safety, superalignment, and preparedness teams is working together with the federal government to ensure that we are preparing safe, secure, and trustworthy AI for the years and decades to come,” Ms. Dilg said at the conference in northern Virginia.
After ChatGPT went live, Microsoft infused ChatGPT into its products. Bing Chat is powered by ChatGPT and Microsoft is spending billions of dollars to advance OpenAI’s tech.
And Google, under mounting pressure to catch up to competitors, finally demoed its AI model, Gemini, earlier this month.
Mr. Lemoine said he views Gemini as an upgraded version of the LaMDA system he toyed with in 2022 and believes felt emotions.
He said the new Google AI system also appears sentient but it understands it is an AI tool and not a human. He said that’s a positive development.
AI industry players are increasingly finding themselves butting up against the government, as Nvidia, the company whose technology and software are powering much of the AI revolution, found out this year.
It joined the trillion-dollar market capitalization club in May with the adoption of its chips for a range of AI technology from robotics to medical imaging. The company posted the best-performing stock on the S&P 500’s index through 2023’s first three quarters, according to a Motley Fool analysis.
But word spread in October that the Commerce Department’s new export restrictions could affect Nvidia’s shipments to China next year. The company’s stock plummeted 5% as it faced potentially having to cancel several billions of dollars in sales.
The governmental thorn in Nvidia’s side is Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
Speaking in December at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California, Ms. Raimondo said she had a message to the “CEOs of chip companies in this audience who are a little cranky with me.”
She said national security matters more than revenue, and the U.S. government intends to deny China access to cutting-edge chip technology — so American entrepreneurs should not try to circumvent her authority.
“If you redesign a chip around a particular cut line that enables them to do AI, I’m going to control it the very next day,” Ms. Raimondo said.
Precisely how Nvidia navigates the increased scrutiny from Ms. Raimondo will determine whether it can sustain its business success in the new year.
Where artificial intelligence tools take people in 2024 is anyone’s guess.
The next wave of AI capabilities may fuel new neuromorphic computing products modeled after the human brain. Large companies, such as IBM and Intel, to a range of smaller startups are looking for ways to design hardware with advanced AI software that can enable new autonomous systems and intelligent devices.
“The possibilities of what comes next are endless, we need to pick,” said Mr. Lemoine, the former Google software engineer. “We need to pick which fairytale we want to try to build because we probably can. We want to build ‘Alice in Wonderland’? We can right now, that’s just it. But we can’t build everything.”
• Guy Taylor contributed to this article, which is based in part on wire service reports.
