ChatGPT mania may be cooling, but a serious new industry is taking shape
artificial intelligence (ai) was like nothing else the world had seen. Within two months of its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT had racked up 100m users. Internet searches for “artificial intelligence" surged; more than $40bn in venture capital flowed into ai firms in the first half of this year alone.
The craze for consumer experimentation has since cooled a little: ChatGPT use has fallen and fewer people are Googling “ai". Son Masayoshi, a Japanese investor notorious for diving into already frothy markets, is thought to be interested in investing in Openai , Chatgpt’s creator. But a second, more serious phase is beginning.
An entirely new industry centred on supercharged ai models is taking shape. Three forces will determine what it eventually looks like—and whether OpenAI stays dominant, or other players prevail. The first factor is computing power, the cost of which is forcing model-builders to become more efficient.
Faced with the eye-watering costs of training and running more powerful models, for instance, Openai is not yet training its next big model, gpt-5, but gpt-4.5 instead, a more efficient version of its current leading product. That could give deep-pocketed rivals such as Google a chance to catch up. Gemini, the tech giant’s soon-to-be-released cutting-edge model, is thought to be more powerful than OpenAI’s current version.
High computing costs have also encouraged the proliferation of much smaller models, which are trained on specific data to do specific things. Replit, a startup, has trained a model on computer code to help developers write programs, for instance. Open-source models are also making it easier for people and companies to plunge into the world of generative ai.
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