Hate to rain on y’all’s parade but…ChatGPT is not the best thing since sliced bread. It’s not the Macintosh. It’s not the iPhone.
It’s software that translates search requests and results into what seems like plain English. Whether it’s useful depends on the input it gets. Garbage in, garbage out.
That doesn’t mean ChatGPT is Bitcoin or blockchain. It makes search accessible again. But it also makes search messy again. It creates imprecision in a world of 1s and 0s. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Humans are imprecise. We’re messy. And it is fun to see computer output seem as imprecise and messy as we are.
It’s very easy to get a lie out of ChatGPT. Ask it about a subject where there are lots of lies on the Internet. They will appear in your answer. ChatGPT doesn’t have a filter. Yet.
But ChatGPT is the start of something. It could be the start of many things. It could, for example, bring back tools like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. The promise and premise of voice interfaces was that you could ask a casual question and get casual answers. That’s the essence of ChatGPT.
Microsoft won’t have things its own way here, although that’s how investors are thinking about it. There will be competitors. Google has already tried one out. Apple will have one. So will Amazon. Over time these engines will merge. It would be nice if all this happened in an open source way, but Microsoft decided to foreclose that for now, which sucks. But it will happen.
When I talked about where computing happens, and about it happening in the air, I was mainly thinking of machine-to-machine communication of data and instructions. I wasn’t talking about ChatGPT. But it’s the same thing.
Welcome to the first big hype cycle of the 2020s.
