ChatGPT Creates an A.I. Frenzy

Microsoft is poised to invest billions in OpenAI and its groundbreaking bot. Why the future Sam Altman is building is both awesome and terrifying.

- By Jeremy Kahn, Michal Lev-Ram and Jessica Mathews

A few times in a generation, a product comes along that catapults a technology from the fluorescent gloom of engineering department basements, the fetid teenage bedrooms of nerds, and the lonely man caves of hobbyists into something that your great-aunt Edna knows how to use. There were web browsers as early as 1990. But it wasn't until Netscape Navigator came along in 1994 that most people discovered the internet. There were MP3 players before the iPod debuted in 2001, but they didn't spark the digital music revolution. There were smartphones before Apple dropped the iPhone in 2007 too-but before the iPhone, there wasn't an app for that.

On Nov. 30, 2022, artificial intelligence had what might turn out to be its Netscape Navigator moment.

The moment was ushered in by Sam Altman, the chief executive officer of OpenAI, a San Francisco-based A.I. company that was founded in 2015 with financial backing from a clutch of Silicon Valley heavy hitters including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and fellow PayPal alum and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman. On Nov. 30, some seven years after the company's launch, Altman tweeted: "today we launched ChatGPT. try talking with it here," followed by a link that would let anyone sign up for an account to begin conversing with OpenAI's new chatbot for free.