Still missing: AI’s killer app 

It’s strange to think that ChatGPT almost didn’t occur. Before its launch in November 2022, Ilya Sutskever, cofounder and chief scientist at OpenAI, wasn’t impressed by its accuracy. Others in the corporate anxious it wasn’t much of an advance. Under the hood, ChatGPT was more remix than revolution. It was driven by GPT-3.5, a big language model that OpenAI had developed several months earlier. However the chatbot rolled a handful of engaging tweaks—specifically, responses that were more conversational and more on point—into one accessible package. “It was capable and convenient,” says Sutskever. “It was the primary time AI progress became visible to people outside of AI.”

The hype kicked off by ChatGPT hasn’t yet run its course. “AI is the one game on the town,” says Sutskever. “It’s the most important thing in tech, and tech is the most important thing within the economy. And I believe that we’ll proceed to be surprised by what AI can do.”

But now that we’ve seen what AI can do, perhaps the immediate query is what it’s for. OpenAI built this technology and not using a real use in mind. , the researchers looked as if it would say after they released ChatGPT. . Everyone has been scrambling to work out what that’s since.

“I find ChatGPT useful,” says Sutskever. “I take advantage of it quite often for every kind of random things.” He says he uses it to look up certain words, or to assist him express himself more clearly. Sometimes he uses it to look up facts (although it’s not all the time factual). Other people at OpenAI use it for vacation planning (“What are the highest three diving spots on this planet?”) or coding suggestions or IT support.  

Useful, but not game-changing. Most of those examples might be done with existing tools, like search. Meanwhile, staff inside Google are said to be having doubts in regards to the usefulness of the corporate’s own chatbot, Bard (now powered by Google’s GPT-4 rival, Gemini, launched last month). “The most important challenge I’m still pondering of: what are LLMs truly useful for, when it comes to helpfulness?” Cathy Pearl, a user experience lead for Bard, wrote on Discord in August, in keeping with Bloomberg. “Like really making a difference. TBD!”

With no killer app, the “wow” effect ebbs away. Stats from the investment firm Sequoia Capital show that despite viral launches, AI apps like ChatGPT, Character.ai, and Lensa, which lets users create stylized (and sexist) avatars of themselves, lose users faster than existing popular services like YouTube and Instagram and TikTok.

“The laws of consumer tech still apply,” says Benaich. “There will likely be a number of experimentation, a number of things dead within the water after a few months of hype.”

In fact, the early days of the web were also affected by false starts. Before it modified the world, the dot-com boom led to bust. There’s all the time the prospect that today’s generative AI will fizzle out and be eclipsed by the subsequent big thing to return along.

Whatever happens, now that AI is fully within the mainstream, area of interest concerns have change into everyone’s problem. As Schaefer says, “We’re going to be forced to grapple with these issues in ways in which we haven’t before.”