Those attending the World Economic Forum earlier this month had a plethora of solemn issues to discuss: the energy crisis, war in Ukraine, China-US tensions and inflation, to name but a few. But the topic creating a buzz over the dining tables was something else: ChatGPT, the artificial-intelligence platform recently launched by OpenAI, a small American start-up, that appears to converse and create content (almost) like a human.
“It’s all anyone wants to talk about,” one chief executive officer ruefully remarked, as the Davos attendees swapped tales about their own experiments with ChatGPT in the office, and fretted over whether their kids were using it to do homework.
The fascination partly arises because its potent capabilities make it “a game-changer that society and industry need to be ready for”, as the WEF says. But it also points to an intriguing question: could this so-called generative AI, which answers questions, undermine the dominance of the mighty Google Search platform? Is a Silicon Valley giant, infamous for disruption, about to be disrupted itself?