Market comment 2023

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But then in March, OpenAI decided that it needn’t just be a service provider – it could also be a platform on which other companies could build businesses. So it published a set of application programming interfaces (API) that would allow developers to add a version of ChatGPT to their services (for a fee, of course) without having to sink shedloads of money into building and training their own language models. This was the step that more or less guaranteed that ChatGPT would, in due course, be everywhere. A good analogy is what happened with Google Maps. Way back in the mists of time, the Google co-founders decided that they would map the entire planet. It was a stupendously expensive and ambitious project, made possible only by the fact that their company had money to burn. But they did it, in the process creating one of the networked world’s most useful resources.

And now? Try booking a hotel, a restaurant, finding a garage, a sports venue, or almost anything else that has a geographical location, and under “location” on its website you find the relevant segment of a Google map, which is incorporated into the site using the company’s Maps Embed API. Something analogous is already beginning to happen with ChatGPT: in time, whenever you encounter a text box on a website or in an app, you’ll find yourself dealing with ChatGPT (or one of its digital peers) courtesy of an API. In this way, Pichai’s idea of “AI everywhere” will be realised, even if the AI in question isn’t particularly intelligent.

AI will be everywhere, but its rise will be mundane not apocalyptic | John Naughton | The Guardian