You wait ages for an AI chatbot to come along, then a whole bunch turn up. Why?
W hen, late last year, the editor asked me and other Observer writers what we thought 2023 would be like, my response was that it would be more like 1993 than any other year in recent history. Why? Simply this: 1993 was the year that Mosaic, the first modern web browser, launched and all of a sudden the non-technical world understood what this strange “internet” thing was for. This was despite the fact that the network had been switched on a whole decade earlier, during which time the world seemed almost entirely unaware of it; as a species, we seem to be slow on the uptake.
Much the same would happen in 2023, I thought, with ChatGPT. Machine-learning technology, misleadingly rebranded as artificial intelligence (AI), has been around for eons, but for the most part, only geeks were interested in it. And then out comes ChatGPT and suddenly “meatspace” (internet pioneer John Perry Barlow’s derisive term for the non-techie world) wakes up and exclaims: “So that’s what this AI stuff is all about. Wow!”
And then all hell breaks loose, because it turns out that all the tech giants, who had been obsessed with this generative AI stuff for years, realised that they had been scooped by a small US research outfit called OpenAI (cunningly funded by boring old Microsoft). Google, Meta, Amazon and co were panic-stricken by the realisation that the AI bandwagon, hauled by a Microsoft locomotive, was pulling out of the station – and they weren’t on it.
There then followed an orgy of me-too-ism. It turns out that apparently everybody and his dog had had their own large language model (LLM) all along. It’s just that they were too high-minded to release them until OpenAI did the unthinkable and broke ranks. Those of us who follow the
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