What's the wAlt?

NZ needs to act as the talk of the technology world quickly becomes a key tool of business and government. 

- PETER GRIFFIN

There have been a number of recent inflection points in the information age when a mere product has become a movement: the debut of the iPhone and Amazon's Kindle and the rise of Facebook and Netflix are among them.

But the debut of ChatGPT in November 2022 was something else entirely. Within weeks, the generative artificial intelligence application from San Francisco-based startup OpenAI became the most rapidly adopted web application in history, used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. It spawned a headlong race to exploit a field of AI- large language models (LLMs) trained on masses of digital information that only emerged in 2018.

AI systems have been in use for decades, deciding the order of posts in your Facebook newsfeed and enabling Smartgate machines in airports to match your face with your passport photo. But the versatility of ChatGPT, which was able to assemble coherent responses to a wide range of questions, has meant everyone from students to business leaders and politicians have finally been able to grasp Al's power.

Hollywood actors and scriptwriters took to the picket lines in protest over its use to automatically generate new works based on their visage, words and ideas. University and high school teachers had to wade through a deluge of Al-generated essays. Software developers had access to tools that could automate swathes of computer code in seconds.

The flurry of activity culminated in late November, almost on the anniversary of ChatGPT's debut, when the chief executive of OpenAI, Sam Altman, was ousted from the wildly successful company he co-founded with Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk in 2015. The move backfired badly. Within a few days, Altman was back at OpenAI and all but one of its board members had resigned to be replaced by new, more business-friendly directors.