Two years of ChatGPT: the conversation that never ends

Two years can be an eternity for the technology industry: plenty of time for enterprises to innovate, launch a new product, peak on the stock market… and then plummet again.

Think about the bubbles that briefly surrounded 3D printing, smart glasses, or the metaverse.

But somehow ChatGPT has escaped that fate because two years after its launch —around the time when enthusiasm for the metaverse began to collapse — it is still on everyone’s lips and has managed to revolutionize the way many of us live and work.

OpenAI’s well-known chatbot has put generative artificial intelligence (genAI) firmly in the public sphere, prompting a wave of imitators and even moving the agendas of the highest political bodies.

The European Union, for example, had been working for several years on a new regulation for AI, but this was completely disrupted by the appearance of generative AI. It was renegotiated in record time, resulting in the AI Act approved last December.

This fact shows that this technology is not only about possibilities, but also about laws, ethics and philosophy, and security and privacy challenges. In addition, it has revealed the opposing strategies of the geopolitical blocs in the race for the digital economy.

All this, due in large part to the explosion of ChatGPT. In fact, six months after the chatbot’s release, the Future of Life Institute asked for a pause in its development in an open letter, saying its risks could not be controlled, even going so far as to say that it could pose a danger to our civilization as we know it if systems were built that surpassed humans. More than 31,000 people signed the letter, including industry figures such as Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and OpenAI cofounder Elon Musk.

ChatGPT broke all predictions. A study by UBS found that it was the fastest consumer application to reach 100 million users, in just two months, although it has since been surpassed by Meta’s social network Threads. And, at the business level, it has one million licenses. In total, it has more than 180.5 million monthly active users as of April of this year, and its page was accessed by 1,625 million visitors in the month of February, according to PrimeWeb.

“It has transformed the way we interact with technology,” says Fernando Maldonado, an independent analyst. “Today, anyone can access AI without the need for advanced knowledge or intermediaries, something that was previously reserved for specialists.” 

Sara Robisco, a data scientist and author of the book Historia de la Inteligencia Artificial, adds that there has also been a great marketing movement to get it used by everyone.

Evolving intelligence

It has been possible to reach this point, the two experts say, through the use of vast computing capacity, fed by new sources of data from a multitude of forums, documents, and social networks.

“Generative AI stands out because its improvements are due to the intensive use of resources, which depend directly on these two variables. For example, that the model processes more contextual information or its access to more up-to-date or specialized cases,” says Maldonado.

Thus, as far as society is concerned, ChatGPT has caused people to start looking for “more or less acceptable” information in a chatbot, in Robisco’s eyes.

Now, we are fully in the ‘GPT4 era’, the latest version of the system that improves in text, speech recognition and can even generate code, which has given rise to multimodal models. “It is possible to create videos from text,” says Maldonado. “In particular, this year we have seen how we have been able to ask it to draw something, thus expanding the ways of communicating with AI.”

Its evolution is clear, Robisco adds. “It is a model that has already been trained, which does not have to be started from scratch, which means that in a short time we can see significant improvements.” But ChatGPT still hallucinates a lot. “You have to ask them very specific questions and keep in mind that you can’t ask for something too current.”

And Maldonado sees the evolution continuing: “We are at a stage in which generative AI is developing reasoning capabilities, understood as planning and solving problems autonomously. These are the so-called AI agents, which can be understood as an evolution of virtual assistants. Although there is still a long way to go, I think it is useful to think that it is going from being a doctor’s office to a collaborator that does things for you.”

Risks and challenges

Given generative AI’s potential and upward progress, it raises many questions. One of the most controversial and feared is that it may take away jobs, if it is not already doing so — at least the most repetitive and automatable. Forrester estimates that generative AI replaced about 90,000 jobs globally in 2023, and that by 2030 the figure will increase to 2.4 million.

Maldonado believes that it is not doing it massively or directly. “In reality, it does not seek to replace people, but to empower them. However, as these models become more sophisticated and numerous, worker productivity will grow exponentially. As a result, fewer people will be needed to perform the same tasks.

Robisco, on the other hand, is optimistic about this and believes that it will only remove the most repetitive tasks, leaving the most creative, important and value-added part to humans.

But this is not the only issue of concern about generative AI: there are also the hallucinations themselves, bias in the data, or the lack of transparency and traceability. “This is going to limit some use cases, covered by current regulations and those that are to come,” says Maldonado.

And let’s not forget the security and privacy of the data those models are being fed, and how attackers use them to refine their threats. “There will even be people who can get private information just by knowing how to interrogate the machine,” Maldonado says.

OpenAI, in the middle of the maelstrom

If ChatGPT’s career has been dizzying and not without debate two past years, that of its creator company is not far behind. OpenAI was founded as a non-profit, then as it began to release products, Microsoft became its main investor. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman left abruptly, briefly joined Microsoft and, shortly after, returned.

Among the company’s other founders, Elon Musk, who had already left the company, sued its directors for breaking with the original statutes and becoming a for-profit company. He was right, as the latest movements of the organization confirm it, with many executives leaving and the company searching for more funding.

There are also those who wonder whether the illustrious Altman has become a liability for OpenAI itself.

In any case, Robisco summarizes, the company’s still-brief history corresponds to a “typical case of someone who want to innovate with a toy that they see no future for. But people have started using it and want it. The product is no longer a toy and now they want to price it.”

This article was first published, in Spanish, on Computerworld España as Dos años de ChatGPT: la conversación que no cesa.