The First Year of Tech: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the Dark Side of Its Mighty Future (and Its Implications for the Future)
ChatGPT also changed the tech world. The $1 billion gamble Microsoft took on OpenAI turned out to be a masterstroke. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, with early access to OpenAI’s advances, quickly integrated the technology behind ChatGPT into its Bing search engine and pledged billions more of investment to its maker. This triggered an AI arms race. When it was publicly bragged that it was going slowly on releasing its LLMs, it went into a frantic Code Red to push out its own bot. Hundred of AI startups launched, and contenders like Anthropic and Inflection raised hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. But no company benefited more than Nvidia, which built the chips that powered large language models. ChatGPT had scrambled tech’s balance of power.
Millions of people tried to figure out how to use this tool to improve their work. Many more simply played with it in wonder. I can’t count the number of times where journalists asked ChatGPT itself for comment on something and dutifully reported its response. It is difficult to say what they were trying to prove. Human content is expected to be the novelty one day.
Maybe most significantly, ChapGPT was a shrieking wake-up call that a technology with impact at least on the scale of the internet was about to change our lives. While the governments in the US, Europe, and even China had been watching the rise of artificial intelligence, Barack Obama was eager to talk about it when he guest-hosted an issue of WIRED. An executive order from the Trump White House was released. All of it was done with talk. Politicians realized after the revolution of the first order that scientific revolutions don’t care about bluster and that this was a revolution of the first order. In the last year, AI regulation rose to the top of the stack of must-deal-with issues for Congress and the White House. Joe Biden’s own, expansive executive order seemed to reflect the sudden urgency, though it’s far from clear that it will change the course of events.
At first it looked unbelievable, but Henry Kissinger had died. The news outlets and the world started anticipating the passing of Nixon’s secretary of state at 100 years old. When people heard about it in Chain Texts, it seemed ridiculous. Everything does now. Musk told advertisers to fuck themselves at a time when X might use the money. Even intelligence is artificial.
There is a premium on genuineness these days. On the real deal. The word of the year is authentic. Like Spotify Wrapped, the announcement is something of an internet holiday. And like Wrapped, 2023’s word has ties to Taylor Swift, who is Spotify’s most-streamed artist and someone fans find to be genuine. Beyond Swift, searches for “authentic” were up on M-W “driven by stories and conversations about AI, celebrity culture, identity, and social media.”
That last one is tricky. Social media has become more of a nucleus of misinformation and disinformation than previously believed, and it now is a defacto news source. According to new research by the think tanks, news consumption on social media is increasing in the US, with 43 percent of TikTok users now saying they got their news from the app, up from 22 percent in 2020. If Gen Z members rely on creators for information, they are more likely to be lied to. Remember the (not authentic) death of Lil Tay?
With Donald Trump running for president in America, these discussions will only get louder, even though hand-wringing about truth and “fake news” is nothing new. New York Republican George Santos faces expulsion from Congress following an indictment alleging he made false statements. Musk, who controls one of the largest social media platforms, is giving QAnon conspiracy theorists hope, and it’s not even 2024 yet.
What’s worse, AI wasn’t nearly as capable in 2016 as it is now. Deepfake videos of then US presidential candidate Joe Biden slipped through Meta’s fingers in 2020, but now that scores of generative AI tools are available to almost anyone with an internet connection, 2024 already feels like it’ll be awash in manipulated text and images—photo ops that never happened, fake celebrity endorsements. You may hope that increased awareness of artificial intelligence will result in people developing good bullshit detectors, but this isn’t the case because as soon as anyone learns of its potential, it’s already two steps ahead.
Moore’s law, as you may have heard, is dead. Jensen Huang made that statement last year. A few months later, the world found out that OpenAI trained ChatGPT on an Nvidia supercomputer; this week, the same day Merriam-Webster announced authentic was the word of the year, The New Yorker declared that Huang’s company was “powering the AI revolution.” If his chips help generate new Taylor Swift videos or “Tom Hanks” movies by the year 2015, the US electorate will have decided what truth it wants to live in. Twelve months is a long time but that future feels like it was just yesterday.