The Tech World Changed as a result of the ChatGPT and the Bing AI Arms Race: A Brief History of the Rise and Fall of Artificial Intelligence

The tech world changed as a result of the ChatGPT. It turned out that Microsoft was a masterstroke with their $1 billion bet on Openai. Microsoft promptly integrated the technology of Openai into its Bing search engine and pledged billions more investment to its maker. This triggered an AI arms race. After publicly boasting that it was going slow on release of its LLMs it went into a frantic “Code Red” to push out its own search based bot. Hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars were raised by the competitors of Anthropic and Inflection. No company benefited more than Nvidia from building large language models. ChatGPT had scrambled tech’s balance of power.

Millions of people tried to figure out how to use this tool to improve their work. Many more simply looked at it. I don’t think I can calculate the number of times that journalists have asked about something and reported its response. It is difficult to say what they were trying to prove. Maybe one day human content will be the novelty.

Maybe most significantly, ChapGPT was a shrieking wake-up call that a technology with impact at least on the scale of the internet was about to change our lives. Governments in the US, Europe, and even China had been nervously monitoring AI’s rise for years; when Barack Obama guest-hosted an issue of WIRED in 2016, he was eager to talk about the technology. The White House released an executive order. All of that was mostly talk. Politician realized that scientific revolutions don’t pay much attention to bluster, and that this was a revolution of the first order. In the last year, AI regulation rose to the top of the stack of must-deal-with issues for Congress and the White House. Joe Biden’s own, expansive executive order seemed to reflect the sudden urgency, though it’s far from clear that it will change the course of events.

At first it looked unbelievable, but Henry Kissinger had died. The world had been prepared for the passing of President Nixon’s secretary of State for a while. Still, when people were finding out via emoji-filled chain texts, it seemed unreal. Everything is doing right now. Deepfakes, the metaverse, Elon Musk telling advertisers to fuck themselves at a time when X could probably use the money. Even intelligence is artificial.

Perhaps this is why there is a premium on genuineness these days. On the real deal. Monday, Merriam-Webster announced its word of the year: authentic. The announcement is like a holiday on the internet. Like Wrapped, the word of 2023 has a connection to Taylor Swift, who is the most-streamed artist on the service. The M-W was driven by stories and discussions about artificial intelligence, celebrity culture, identity, and social media.

That last one is tricky. While social media has, now more than ever, become a nucleus of disinformation and misinformation, it’s also become a de facto news source. New research from the think tank Pew notes that news consumption on social media is on the rise in the US; 43 percent of TikTok users, for example, now say they get their news from the app, up from 22 percent in 2020. If members of Gen Z rely on creators for their information, they are less likely to be deceived. Did you remember the death of L’Traph?

As a new presidential election looms in America, discussions about truth and “fake news” are only going to get more heated. George Santos faces expulsion from Congress after being indicted for making false statements. He controls one of the largest social media platforms, and so Musk is giving a hope to conspiracy theorists.

What’s worse, AI wasn’t nearly as capable in 2016 as it is now. Even though Joe Biden was a US presidential candidate in 2020 and a deep fake video was released, it now feels like it will be awash in manipulated text and images. You’d hope that increased awareness of AI has led people, simultaneously, to develop good bullshit detectors, but that’s the problem with AI—as soon as anyone learns of its potential, it’s already two steps ahead.

Moore’s law, as you may have heard, is dead. Nvidia cofounder Jensen Huang made that pronouncement this time last year. The New Yorker declared that the company was powering the artificial intelligence revolution just a few days after the word of the year was announced. A year from now, his chips may be generating new “Taylor Swift” videos, or “Tom Hanks” movies, and the US electorate will have decided what truth it wants to live in. Twelve months is a long time but the future feels soon.