Since ChatGPT was rolled out in November 2022, many people in science, business, and media have become obsessed with AI. A quick look at my own work published during that period shows that I am one of the guilty ones. My defense is that I share the belief with other obsessives that large-scale language models are the cutting edge of breakthrough change. Maybe I’m swimming in generative Kool-Aid, but advances in AI, as far as we can understand, are changing not just the way we work, but the way our businesses are structured, and ultimately I believe it will change the course of humanity.
Not everyone agrees, and there has been a backlash in recent months. Some experts now opine that AI has been oversold and overhyped. Gary Marcus, the self-proclaimed chief executive of AI Criticism, recently said of the LLM boom, “I wouldn’t be surprised if this whole thing fizzled out to some extent.” Some argue that AI is stuck in a “trough of disillusionment.”
This week we have some data that doesn’t resolve the larger questions, but provides a snapshot of how the United States, if not the world, views the emergence of AI and large-scale language models. I got it. The Pew Research Center, which conducted similar research during the rise of the Internet, social media, and mobile devices, released its findings on how ChatGPT is used, rated, and trusted. The samples were taken between February 7 and 11 this year.
Some numbers initially seem to indicate that the LLM debate may be a narrow-minded disagreement that most people don’t care about.one third of Americans not listening ChatGPT. Just under a quarter use it. Oh, and what about the panic that AI will flood the public sphere with misinformation about his 2024 election? So far, using ChatGPT to get information about the presidential election season that has already begun Only 2% of Americans did.
But more broadly, the data from this study shows that the rise of powerful technology is only just beginning. If we accept Pew’s sample as representative of all Americans, then millions of people are actually familiar with ChatGPT. And there is one thing in particular that stands out to him. While 17% of respondents said they had used ChatGPT for entertainment and an equal number said they had tried ChatGPT to learn something new, only 20% of adults % said they had used his ChatGPT for work. This is a dramatic increase from the 12% who answered affirmatively when asked the same question six months ago, an increase of two-thirds.
I spoke to Colleen McClain, a Pew researcher involved in the study, and she agreed that the research seems to go hand in hand with other big technological changes. “If you look at her chart of long-term trends in internet access, smartphones and social media, some of them certainly point to this rise,” she says. Some technologies have plateaued, she added. But in the example she mentioned, a plateau came only when so many people joined that there were very few stragglers left.
What’s strange about ChatGPT’s jump in business usage from 12 percent to 20 percent is that humans are only in the early stages of collaborating with these models. Additionally, tools to fully leverage ChatGPT are in their early stages. It’s changing rapidly. ChatGPT creator’s OpenAI is in full swing, and AI giants Microsoft and Google are still in the process of repurposing employees and redesigning all product lines to integrate conversational AI. It is located in And startups like Sierra, which are building agents for enterprise customers, are enabling tailored usage leveraging multiple models. As this process continues, more people will use AI tools. And since the underlying model has improved dramatically, we hear that GPT5 is coming this year, which will make it even more appealing. This raises the possibility that the quality of virtually all work will depend on how well we can tap into the talents of our robot collaborators.
What technologies from the past have helped us understand the trajectory of the rockets we’re on? It’s hard to find anything similar, since the limits of AI are almost limitless, but I’d like to introduce the spreadsheet. I suggest. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston invented this concept in his 1978 year, and a year later it was embodied in his VisiCalc, which at the time only ran on Apple computers. Spreadsheets have had an incredible and disruptive impact on the business world. More than just accounting tools, they ushered in an era of business innovation and disrupted the flow of information within companies. However, it took several years for spreadsheets to become widely adopted in the business world. The turning point came with new, more powerful products called Lotus 1, 2, and 3, which ran on IBM PCs. Current and upcoming startups in the AI industry like Sierra all want to become the Lotus of our time, but they also want to become more important and enduring companies. . Spreadsheets are primarily limited to the business domain. LLM can be confusing at first glance anything.
