ChatGPT artificial intelligence arrives on smartphones

OpenAI launched, Thursday, May 18, a mobile application for ChatGPT, its generative artificial intelligence (AI) interface which is already experiencing phenomenal growth on the web, and whose impressive capacities fascinate and worry.

The new application is available on iPhones in the United States, to begin with, and should arrive “Soon” in other countries and on mobile phones operated by Android (Google), according to the company. Free, it allows, like the website, to chat with the chatbot and above all to ask it to write messages, explain technical concepts, suggest ideas or summarize notes. OpenAI promises for example “to get accurate information without having to sort between advertisements or multiple results”, the current model of search engines. But when first opened, the app warns as soon as ChatGPT can “provide inaccurate information about people, places or facts”.

Nearly 100 million monthly active users

Launched at the end of November, the ChatGPT website exceeded one million users in one week, a record. Two months later, the service already had some 100 million monthly active users, another record according to a UBS study reported by the press. Microsoft, the main investor in OpenAI, has integrated the broad language model on which ChatGPT is based into Bing, its search engine, and Google is about to launch a test version with generative AI.

This lightning-fast adoption of ChatGPT and other generative AI software (computer code, images, sound, video) is causing fundamental concern across many industries. Teachers see their students delegate their essays to ChatGPT, many administrative and creative jobs are threatened, politicians fear that this technology will promote increasingly sophisticated misinformation and lawsuits have been launched on questions of intellectual property.