To a user firing up OpenAI's chatbot hoping to generate automated haiku about the American Revolution or recipes for Spam casserole, the product's basic interface and instantaneous answers can seem simple, even magical.
On the other side of those queries, though, an immense amount of work is going on. OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot requires far more computing power to answer a question than Google takes to respond to a web search. The startup's current offering is good enough to inspire speculation about a world in which it and programs like it take over some disruptive proportion of the work that only humans can do today. But even if that's where the economy is headed, getting there is beyond the average startup's capacity.
Generative artificial intelligence products have many hurdles to overcome before fulfilling the wildest hopes and fears that they've inspired sinc OpenAI introduced ChatGPT in November. The service has suffered the kind of outages that come with running any suddenly popular website. It also has the potential to give incorrect information and can't answer many questions about recent events.
OpenAI and its competitors will likely be grappling with these issues for years.
But the challenge of computing power in particular is likely to shape the development of the field. Startups such as OpenAI may start charging for services that are now free as they mature. Some companies could look for ways to make more targeted products with computing needs that aren't as intensive. And the cost of computing is already influencing which entities will have influence over the AI products that seem set to shape the internet's future.
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