Jess Cheng Schrepel’s post on Artificial Intelligence (AI) was thought provoking. AI has been a particularly hot subject in the financial news and Jess’ post made me wonder why. So I looked into it.
AI as a concept has been around for a long time, and has gained momentum in recent years. However, AI became a news phenomenon when the app called ChatGPT was released by a company called OpenAI on 11/30/22. Swiss bank UBS says it became the fastest growing app of all time, amassing 100 million active users in January 2023, only two months after its launch. By comparison, it took TikTok nine months to reach 100 million users.
ChatGPT is described as a natural language processing tool and is implemented using AI technology. One interacts with it with questions and instructions similar to spoken, natural language. So it can be like a conversation. You can ask it questions or instruct it to do tasks like writing a poem or writing software code. The public can use it for free at the moment because it has limited data (only up to 2021) and is still in the research phase. A paid-for version called ChatGPT Plus was released in February and is more advanced, and has access to the internet, and therefore current data.
ChatGPT is viewed as a potentially big advancement over a search engine. A search on Google results in a page of links that the user must browse and learn and iterate to an answer they are looking for. ChatGPT provides a single answer quickly. Currently, the answers are not always accurate, but will get better. But ChatGPT can also do more advanced tasks like write an essay or computer code. For example, a technology entrepreneur[RL1] was recently interviewed on CNBC. He was asked what he thought ChatGPT could be used for. He had a recent actual example. One of the best developers he knows was trying to solve a particularly difficult software programming problem. He had been wrestling with it for days. So he described the problem to ChatGPT and it provided the computer code that solved the problem for him. Pretty amazing!
ChatGPT’s reputation also grew through its association with Microsoft[CJ2]. It was well known that Microsoft had invested in OpenAI since 2019. But they upped the ante in January 2023 when they made an additional estimated $10 billion investment. That caused speculation that Microsoft would use the ChatGPT technology to turn the Microsoft search engine, Bing, into a game changer, potentially leapfrogging Google. That story dominated the headlines for a while.
Another transformational AI technology are the computer chips supplied by Nvidia Corporation. Nvidia has been around since the 1990s and was known primarily for the PC graphics cards that enabled fast graphics for computer gamers. Those cards evolved to become chips called Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), which continued to focus on enabling fast graphics. In the past decade Nvidia optimized their GPUs for general computing operations, not just graphics. And it turned out that Nvidia GPUs were coincidentally well suited for running artificial intelligence algorithms. That has made Nvidia a very hot company. In their quarterly earnings report in May, they reported results that were dramatically better than expected. That caused the stock prices for Nvidia, and other companies associated with artificial intelligence, to rise.
So it seems artificial intelligence is in the news more these days because it is at an inflection point. The enabling technology underlying it has matured to make AI development faster and more companies are sprouting to take advantage of it. Apps like ChatGPT are being used by millions of users, who are learning new things that AI is capable of, fueling more growth. That is both promising because of the ways AI can help our companies and we become more productive, but also concerning because the increased capability can also be misused. At the moment, I choose to be optimistic.
Thanks for the recap, Ron. The more real-world AI examples that come out, the more interesting this discussion will become.