ChatGPT has sparked imaginations around the world, with everyone from professors on advertisers, hackers and judges pondering how to best use its capabilities. But what does the man behind all of this think?
Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the company that develops the artificial-intelligence chatbot. For him, ChatGPT is useful as a time-saver—particularly when reading long articles or email threads.
Asked about the “coolest thing you’ve seen someone do on GPT so far” in a recent Forbes interviews, he refused to mention a thing. But he agreed to share the things he found most “personally useful” in.
The answer may be a surprise.
“The summarization was huge for me, more than I thought it would be,” he said. “The fact that I can just have entire articles or long email threads summarized is more useful than I thought.”
That seems to be a basic use of an AI chatbot that most people believe disrupt Google’s search engine business. Microsoft has invested billions in OpenAI with the aim of weaving its technology into all kinds of products, including Google rival Bing.
But Altman downplayed ChatGPT’s ability to replace traditional searchand didn’t see that as the most interesting thing to focus on.
“I mean, I don’t think that ChatGPT [replace Search],” he said Forbes. “But I think in the future, it could be an AI system. More than that, though, I think people are completely missing the opportunity if you’re focused on yesterday’s news. I’m more interested in thinking about what’s to come beyond search. I don’t remember what we did before web search, I was so young.”
He noted that another way ChatGPT is of practical use to him is coding. The tool gives him “the ability to ask esoteric programming questions or help debug code in a way that feels like I have a super brilliant programmer I can talk to,” he says.
However they use it, Altman is betting enough people find ChatGPT useful enough to pay $42 a month for a premium version, which the company launched last week. Paying customers can use ChatGPT even when demand is high, enjoy faster response speeds, and get priority access to new features.
And ChatGPT is actually often out of service because of so many users. Regardless, people keep coming back to it—a sign of “excellent product marketing,” says Elad Gil, a Google alum and respected angel investor. noticed last week.
ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly active users faster than TikTok or InstagramUBS analyst noticed this weekadded, “In 20 years after the internet space, we can’t remember a faster ramp in a consumer internet app.”
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