This text is taken from the Courrier de l’économie of December 19, 2022. To subscribe, click here.
It’s official: the game just changed. Teachers, doctors, lawyers and others say it: there will be a “before” and an “after” December 2022. We owe this tipping point to artificial intelligence in general, and to the ChatGPT interface in particular.
A revolution by artificial intelligence (AI) has been promised for ten years. The benefits of this technology have so far been, if not minor, at least isolated from one industry to another. ChatGPT touches virtually every industry and a majority of people. They range from high school students to university researchers, from shoe salesmen to engineers working in the automotive sector.
This is one of those cases where the expression “you have to see it to believe it” takes on its full meaning. Everyone who has played with this web tool has come away amazed. ChatGPT is not perfect. Far from there. It still embodies the transition to a world where an omniscient digital companion could become normal.
Maybe not in 2023. But one day.
A “new” Google?
Experts have compared the arrival of ChatGPT to that of a “new” Google. Because there was a very disorganized Internet “before” the Californian search engine, then an Internet made accessible to all “after” it went online. Others have instead compared it to the shift that occurred when the first keyboards replaced punched cards in computer programming.
In short, it’s big. But no one agrees on the nature of the impact: will it be good or bad? In law, it is unclear whether this is the end of intellectual property and privacy (probably not). In medicine, we are worried about the advice he will be able to give to people who are wary of hospitals (rightly so). At school, we wonder if this is the end of current teaching methods (probably).
One thing is certain, for the creator of ChatGPT, the American laboratory OpenAI, it’s quite a home run. And guess who founded this non-profit organization? Elon Musk, who else… together with Sam Altman, a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur. OpenAI is also financially supported by Microsoft.
And this reinforces the hold on our societies of a very strong ideology in American techno where progress necessarily passes through these tipping points which bring down established systems: industry, school, the State…