The A.I. era begins right now

While the world buzzes about ChatGPT’s astonishing writing abilities, the next generation of business tools is forming, amid a shift that could prove as transformative as the internet.

- By Alex Konrad and Kenrick Cai

In an unremarkable conference room inside OpenAI’s office, insulated from the mid-January rain pelting San Francisco, company president Greg Brockman surveys the “energy levels” of the team overseeing the company’s new artificial intelligence model, ChatGPT. “How are we doing between ‘everything’s on fire and everyone’s burned out’ to ‘everyone’s just back from the holidays and everything’s good’? What’s the spectrum?” he asks.

“I would say the holidays came at just the right time,” replies one lieutenant. That’s an understatement. Within five days of ChatGPT’s November launch, 1 million users overloaded its servers with trivia questions, poetry prompts and recipe requests. (Forbes estimates it’s now 5 million-plus.) OpenAI quietly routed some of the load to its training supercomputer, thousands of interconnected graphics processing units (GPUs) custom-built with allies Microsoft and Nvidia, while longterm work on its next models, like the highly anticipated GPT-4, took a back seat.

As the group huddles, ChatGPT’s at-capacity servers still turn away users. The previous day, it went down for two hours. Yet amid the fatigue, this roomful of employees, all in their twenties and early thirties, clearly relish their roles in a historic moment. “AI is going to be debated as the hottest topic of 2023. And you know what? That’s appropriate,” says Bill Gates, the person most responsible for a similar previous paradigm shift—one known as software. “This is every bit as important as the PC, as the internet.”