“Study computers!” That’s what my grandmother told me. It was the late ’80s, I was in high school and I asked her what she thought I should do after I graduated. 

And Grandma was right (she’s now 93 and still going strong). Tech jobs were plentiful in the ’90s, and I had no problem applying the skills I had learned in the workplace.

I wasn’t the only person who benefitted from the ’90s tech boom. Investors did too, especially in the second half of the decade when the internet became a mainstream technological advance. 

And things are starting to look like the late ’80s when it comes to a new technology: artificial intelligence! 

I’m sure you’ve heard of ChatGPT, the latest version of a natural language-generative artificial intelligence developed by OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence company. 

ChatGPT has become the fastest-growing consumer application in history. 

How fast? The application hit a million users in its first five days and 57 million last December, the first full month after OpenAI launched it. 

It hit over 100 million in January and has seen much faster adoption than past tech trends like the internet and social media.

I’ve toyed around with ChatGPT and its ability to answer questions and generate content is impressive. 

Others have been impressed too. In an experiment reported last month, ChatGPT was used to generate a series of 50 research paper abstracts. 

These were shuffled together with real-world abstracts created by scientists and researchers. When a group of scientists was asked to sort the list by human or machine-generated, they couldn’t always tell that a ChatGPT abstract was machine created — they thought ChatGPT abstracts were human-generated 32% of the time. 

So, it’s fair to say that the technology at work here is quite impressive, impressive enough to attract some big investments.

Funding the Future

When OpenAI was launched in 2015, it raised $1 billion from investors like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and current CEO Sam Altman, formerly president of startup accelerator Y Combinator. 

In 2019, the company received a $1 billion cash infusion in a funding round led by Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) where it also acquired an exclusive license to the GPT-3 language model. 

Microsoft has since more than doubled down on the technology, announcing that it will invest $10 billion in the company. 

With a pilot subscriber program launched earlier this month, ChatGPT is putting its toes in the monetization waters. 

However, while ChatGPT might be getting all the buzz, it’s far from the only player in the game. 

In fact, it’s more like the tip of an iceberg, highly visible because it’s one of the first powerful AI chatbots to be exposed to the public, but there’s much more going on in the tech world. 

Take for example, that other tech giant Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG). 

Headlines were made when Google issued a “code red” over the ChatGPT bot reveal last year, and unsurprisingly so. 

Observers immediately floated the potential for the technology to completely disrupt the search business… Google’s bread and butter. 

Why use a search engine if you can simply ask an AI-enabled personal assistant to point you to what you need?

But Google has been working on similar technology for years… 

The company’s LaMDA AI, built on a transformer technology similar to ChatGPT (GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer), is a deep learning model first introduced at Google in 2017. But there’s a rush on to make AI relevant and monetize its potential now. 

Then, you have a company like Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), which has already built AI features into its iPhones and Watches, including a crash detection feature that automatically calls 911 if it detects an automobile accident. 

Recently, the company released an AI narrator, raising the possibility of putting human-narrated audiobooks in a potential bind — but making it easier for authors to release audio versions of their works. 

As you can see, many tech companies across the space are diving further and further into the world of AI. 

And while many of them have been at it for years, the buzz and popularity sparked by the rise of ChatGPT has brought on a renewed push for new developments and more efficient models. 

To me, it looks like the tech space is about to drastically change to incorporate AI products and services over the next few years.