This article was not written by ChatGPT. But much of the content produced in the world is, or will be. The biggest tech story of 2023 for CFO Brew thus far was unquestionably generative AI, but most especially ChatGPT and its potential for unlocking greater productivity—as well as all the questions about its shortcomings and potential pitfalls.
Now that we’ve reached the halfway point of the year, we’re taking a look back at some of the biggest tech stories we’ve covered this year so far.
Generative AI: The first big waves in the generative AI space were made with image-based products like Dall-E and Midjourney—software that could take a natural-language prompt like “a photo of cat flying out to space as an astronaut, digital art,” and create an image high-quality enough that you might actually use it. These products combined large datasets of labeled images and artwork with large language models like GPT-3.
But then ChatGPT came along at the end of November 2022—a productized version of GPT-3 programmed to interact like a chat-messaging robot, and to respond to people’s questions, summarize content, or to make poems about the Supreme Court’s late-19th century jurisprudence in the style of Dr. Seuss. It reached a whole other level when the latest version of its large language model backend, GPT-4, came out earlier this year.
ChatGPT took the world by storm, generating massive valuations for parent company OpenAI, sending Google’s stock down as the potential for competition to the search engine grew, and prompting the world investing in AI in various forms. It helped turn Nvidia into a trillion-dollar company, and led to the creation of numerous startups. It also claimed its first corporate casualty; the stock price of homework-helping company Chegg has dropped by two-thirds since ChatGPT’s release.
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Amid all the hustle and bustle, the business case for ChatGPT-like products is still a bit unclear. While products like Microsoft Excel are already being refreshed with chat interfaces, we don’t have much sense of what else ChatGPT and large language models can do for users. They aren’t great on representing facts, but research continues in an attempt to optimize the technology.
Layoffs: It seemed like tech’s hunger for labor would never be sated, but then…Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and many more companies laid off more than 170,000 employees this year. It’s still unknown who was and will be most targeted by these layoffs, but it raises the possibility that other firms might have an easier time hiring software developers, data scientists, and the like than they had in the past. Even if hiring tech talent does improve, however, it'll only go so far: The shortfall of software engineers in the next 10 years is estimated at 1.6+ million.
Out of the Metaverse: One clear casualty in tech layoffs is Meta’s insistence that we all join a metaverse, a prospect that seemed a lot rosier during the pandemic. Apple may be resurrecting some version of mixed reality, but the growth of heavy investment in the metaverse appears to be over.