ChatGPT launched three years ago today

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI introduced a new product to the world, innocuously describing it as “a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way.”

It’s no hyperbole to suggest that ChatGPT subsequently transformed the worlds of business and tech, becoming enormously popular — it’s still in the number one spot on Apple’s free app rankings today — while also serving as the catalyst for a flood of generative AI products.

It’s even made people suspicious of the em dash, which no chatbot will ever take from me.

In fact, “Empire of AI” author Karen Hao argued in a recent interview with TechCrunch that OpenAI has “already grown more powerful than pretty much any nation-state in the world,” and is now “rewiring our geopolitics, all of our lives.”

There may be even more dramatic changes to come. Charlie Warzel wrote in The Atlantic that we are now living in “the world ChatGPT built,” which is “defined by a particular type of precarity” and is “perpetually waiting for a shoe to drop.”

“Young generations feel this instability acutely as they prepare to graduate into a workforce about which they are cautioned that there may be no predictable path to a career,” Warzel said. “Older generations, too, are told that the future might be unrecognizable, that the marketable skills they’ve honed may not be relevant.”

Of course, others feel more optimistic about an AI-centric future, and indeed are positioned to profit from it handsomely. But in Warzel’s telling, the AI boosters and investors are waiting along with everyone else — waiting to see if their bets pay off, but also waiting “because a defining feature of generative AI, according to its true believers, is that it is never in its final form.”

Meanwhile, Bloomberg took a more focused look at how ChatGPT has transformed the stock market. The most obvious winner so far has been Nvidia, with its stock up 979% since the chatbot launched. But AI fever has also buoyed other Big Tech companies, with the seven most valuable companies on the S&P 500 — Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Broadcom — all tied to tech, and with their collective growth accounting for nearly half of the benchmark’s 64% increase since ChatGPT was launched.

This has made for a more top-heavy market. The S&P 500 is weighted based on market capitalization, and those same seven companies now account for 35% of the weighting, compared to around 20% three years ago.

How long will this growth last? With the notable exception of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, it’s become increasingly common for AI executives to acknowledge that we might be in a bubble (or if you prefer, a “mania”).

 “Someone is going to lose a phenomenal amount of money in AI,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in August, at a dinner with journalists.

Similarly, Sierra CEO and OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor agreed we are “in a bubble” that he compared it to the dot-com boom of the late ‘90s. While individual companies might fail, he predicted, “AI will transform the economy, and I think it will, like the internet, create huge amounts of economic value in the future.”

In another three years — or less — we might know whether that optimism was warranted.