Is A.I. the start of the “4th industrial revolution” or another dot-com bubble? It could be both.
When OpenAI’s generative A.I. chatbot, ChatGPT, pulled in over 100 million users in under two months after its release in November, the eyes of both Wall Street and Main Street locked onto the new technology. Microsoft darted in to tack on another $10 billion to its initial investment in OpenAI in a move that suggested, finally, a challenge to Google’s search dominance. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, responded by releasing its own generative A.I. chatbot, Bard, and the market was so rapt by the evolving A.I. race that a minor mistake during its rollout sparked a selloff that took $100 billion off Alphabet’s market cap in a single day.
