We are celebrating the second birth anniversary of ChatGPT which was introduced in November 2022. It quickly became the fastest growing app in history with about 200 million as active users today. In its early days, it was hailed as a big leap forward — it had varied capabilities to generate text, images, code. It had the capacity to influence film making and the education system. It has fulfilled some of these expectations — say it is a good educational tool, but its influence on other areas of life and business is still an open question.
In these two years, a handful of tech firms have benefited greatly — the big six tech firms grew in aggregate more than $8 trillion since ChatGPT’s birth. Enterprise level adoption, though slow, has been growing continuously. The app must facilitate transformation of the business in general, rather than enriching the big tech.
Consultancy firms promoted generative AI to their clients. The AI business of IT service firms too is going up. We expect to see the benefits of AI percolate down to small businesses and startups. It is expensive to be in the business of building ‘foundational models’. These have to compete with OpenAI, Google and Facebook models. The smaller businesses focus on building services that act as wrapper around existing models. Even here big tech can introduce a model that snuffs out models of the smaller firms, e.g. speech recognition models suffered when OpenAI introduced Whisper in 2022.
Maybe, the stranglehold of big tech loosens in future, as for specific needs there could be a shift for smaller models. These smaller models are easier and economical.
Of late, AI has plateaued. It is, in fact, an opportunity for businesses to introduce generative AI into their processes and assess it for a return on investment.
ChatGPT has left a legacy two years after its appearance of enriching the big tech. It should lead to the next phase of AI — it should become democratic. It should benefit smaller business. It should have smaller models to remove entry barriers. Till now, the revolutionary technology has just extended the wealth and influence of big tech.