ChatGPT has become one of the fastest growing applications ever seen
ChatGPT, Silicon Valley’s latest standout app, is sending investors scrambling to find the next ‘nugget’ in generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), the technology hailed by some as the dawn of a new era.
For decades, AI has become more and more pervasive in daily life, but the November launch of startup company OpenAI’s chatbot marked a turning point in general public and investor perception.
“From time to time we have platforms that emerge and result in an explosion of new companies. We saw this with the internet and mobile, and AI could be the next platform,” said Shernaz Daver of California-based investment firm Khosla.
Generative AI, of which ChatGPT is an example, navigates through oceans of data to deliver original content—an image, a poem, a 100-word essay—in seconds and with a simple request.
Since its low-key launch in late November, ChatGPT has become one of the fastest-growing applications ever seen, prompting Microsoft and Google to accelerate projects that until now had been closely guarded amid fears the technology wasn’t ready for growth. public use.
Just five days after launch, one million users were using ChatGPT – growth 60 times faster than Facebook in reaching one million users,” said Wayne Hu, a partner at SignalFire, another venture capital firm.
Suddenly, all the investors are talking about how ChatGPT could eliminate millions of skilled jobs, upend trillion-dollar industries, and fundamentally change the way we learn, consume, and make decisions.”
The explosion of generative AI comes at an otherwise bleak time for the tech sector, with tens of thousands of layoffs cascading at the world’s biggest companies, as well as smaller ones struggling to survive.
While other categories (of companies) are facing shrinking valuations and seeking capital, generative AI companies are not,” Daver said.
For his part, Hu explained that market values for generative AI companies have skyrocketed, while they have contracted for all others.
- “Hard to maintain”
– OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, was valued by Microsoft at about $30 billion even though it continues to burn money at a rapid rate, Hu said. Entrepreneurs who specialize in generative AI say they no longer need to shout for attention when seeking capital or delve into the details of what they’re trying to deliver. - “This has helped a lot,” said Sarah Nagy, founder of Seek AI, a start-up that allows inexperienced users to extract technical information from databases using everyday language queries. Before ChatGPT… I had to explain what generative AI is, and why it is important,” she stressed. Now the appetite for ChatGPT-like capabilities seems limitless, and not just from investors.