🎂 Happy birthday, ChatGPT!

A birthday card to the bot that started it all.

Exponential View via DALL·E 3. “You’ve shown us how vulnerable we are to strings of text produced by a machine - willing to believe and put faith in them. Even though you still misspell your own name on your birthday cakes.”

Happy Birthday, ChatGPT!

You are one today. And what a first year you have had.

You’ve surprised everyone, even your maker.

You’re the fastest-growing consumer product in history, delighting a hundred million of us in sixty days.

You’ve made a case for first-mover advantage. A year on, OpenAI still has the best-performing model.

You’ve made the hideous acronym GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) part of the English language. Was this for shits and giggles or to annoy the French?

You’ve compressed estimates of the arrival of AGI down to 7.2 years. Some reckon it’s possible within 4 or 5. 

You’ve not persuaded many in the scientific community that AGI is around the corner. So, while adherents have revised the priors, that view is far from universal. 

You’ve behaved in really particular ways. So much so that some have suggested you have an internal world model, that the higher dimensionality elicits patterns of our thinking and the structures of the world.

You’ve made Nvidia the Belle of the ball.

You’ve shown what multimodality can do —you're much more capable with images than without.

You’re proof that LLMs are insecure by design.

You’ve shown how AI can drastically enhance productivity, even amongst the highly qualified.

You’ve shown us how vulnerable we are to strings of text produced by a machine - willing to believe and put faith in them. Even though you still misspell your name on your birthday cakes.

You’re often inaccurate and misguided, as you parrot word after word.

You’ve shone a light on the real nature of much “knowledge work.”… how much of it is merely generating the next word?

You've been a beacon in my quest for, often useless, knowledge, saving me countless hours learning about Leo Szilard’s formative years, the last decades of the Qing dynasty, the aetiology of gabber, and so much more.

So what a first year you’ve had. Upended the chessboard, smashed the china, forced us to look in the mirror, and, if we choose, ask hard questions about knowledge, thinking and what people can do and machines can’t. 

But you are still merely code running hot in a data centre, just like some unusable expensing app running on SAP. So I’m eating all the cake. 

Cheers,
Azeem