ChatGPT turns 1: A generative AI status report

It’s hard to believe, but Nov. 30 will mark the one-year anniversary of ChatGPT’s public debut. So we’re taking a look back at the past year to see how businesses are using — and not using — generative artificial intelligence.

Last year, AI specialist Bret Greenstein at the consulting firm PwC knew ChatGPT was a big deal when he got a phone call from someone very much not in tech.

“Within two weeks, my mom was calling me with examples of stuff she did,” Greenstein said. “She didn’t use a microwave for, like, a decade because it was too new.”

Greenstein spends most of his time helping companies incorporate generative AI into their workflows. He said for now, businesses are trusting the tech more for internal uses: “back office finance, supply chain procurement, HR, IT, those kinds of things.”

Two-thirds of companies surveyed by the publisher O’Reilly were using generative AI in some way, the company reported Tuesday.

Amin Ahmad at the enterprise AI company Vectara said the best evidence that a sea change is underway is how many CEOs are calling him.

“We started in 2020. It was hard to get people’s attention,” Ahmad said. “But I think there was no business owner out there that when they were exposed to ChatGPT couldn’t imagine that there was some application for this technology to make their own business more efficient.”

It helps that these AI tools are really good at language translation. Adoption is global. But consider how much better the tech has already become in just 12 months. For one thing, ChatGPT is much less prone to make stuff up.

So economist Anton Korinek at the University of Virginia is kind of surprised we’re not all using it all the time.

“So there’s this increasing schism between what it can do and what people are actually using it for,” Korinek said.

Some of that may simply be fearful employees.

At Stanford Business School, professor Mohsen Bayati always advises execs to bring in subject-matter experts when designing AI systems — say, a doctor for some health AI. But corporate executives are telling him that’s getting harder now.

“We are having difficulty to have the domain experts sit on the same table anymore. Because they’re thinking they’re just helping build something that will replace them,” Bayati said.

Every time I use ChatGPT, I kind of get that feeling too.