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ChatGPT’s US$8 tril birthday gift to Big Tech

Parmy Olson and Carolyn Silverman for Bloomberg Opinion
Parmy Olson and Carolyn Silverman for Bloomberg Opinion • 5 min read
ChatGPT’s US$8 tril birthday gift to Big Tech
The next phase of AI may prove more democratic, as smaller, specialised models lower the barriers to entry. But for now, the revolution that was meant to reshape our world has mostly extended Big Tech’s wealth and influence. Photo: Bloomberg
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Saturday marks two years since OpenAI posted an oddly-named widget called ChatGPT to the web. Its staffers placed bets on how many users it would accumulate, the highest estimate being 100,000. How wrong they were.

ChatGPT quickly became the fastest-growing app in history, with about 200 million active users today. When it first came out, social media was ablaze with examples of how this fluent little text box was a leap ahead of Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri.

It could write poems and high school essays. It would probably reshape Hollywood and the education system. Some of that has come to pass, with schools rethinking how they assign homework, for instance, while its impact on other areas of life and business is still an open question.

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