On 30 November 2022, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted the following, characteristically reserving the use of capital letters for his product’s name: “today we launched ChatGPT. try talking with it here: chat.openai.com”. In a reply to himself immediately below, he added: “language interfaces are going to be a big deal, i think”.
If Altman was aiming for understatement, he succeeded. ChatGPT became the fastest web service to hit 1 million users, but more than that, it fired the starting gun on the AI wars currently consuming big tech. Everything is about to change beyond recognition, we keep being told, though no one can agree on whether that will be for good or ill.
