{"id":12579,"date":"2023-12-09T17:37:50","date_gmt":"2023-12-09T16:37:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2023\/12\/09\/chatgpt-exploded-into-public-life-a-year-ago-now-we-know-what-went-on-behind-the-scenes-john-naughton\/"},"modified":"2023-12-09T17:37:50","modified_gmt":"2023-12-09T16:37:50","slug":"chatgpt-exploded-into-public-life-a-year-ago-now-we-know-what-went-on-behind-the-scenes-john-naughton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2023\/12\/09\/chatgpt-exploded-into-public-life-a-year-ago-now-we-know-what-went-on-behind-the-scenes-john-naughton\/","title":{"rendered":"ChatGPT exploded into public life a year ago. Now we know what went on behind the scenes | John Naughton"},"content":{"rendered":"

The fallout from AI\u2019s \u2018Pearl Harbor moment\u2019 has been dramatic. In tech, 12 months can seem like an eternity<\/p>\n

If a week is a long time in politics, a year is an eternity in tech. Just over 12 months ago, the industry was humming along in its usual way. The big platforms were deep into what Cory Doctorow calls \u201censhittification<\/a>\u201d \u2013 the process in which platforms go from being initially good to their users, to abusing them to make things better for their business customers and finally to abusing those customers in order to claw back all the value for themselves. Elon Musk was ramping up his efforts to alienate advertisers on Twitter\/X and accelerate the death spiral of his expensive toy. TikTok was monopolising every waking hour of teenagers. FTX had just gone bankrupt<\/a> and at least $1bn of investors\u2019 money had gone awol. Here in the UK, the bedraggled online safety bill<\/a> was wending its way through parliament. And nobody outside the tech world had ever heard of Geoffrey Hinton or Sam Altman.<\/p>\n

And then one day \u2013 30 November 2022, to be precise \u2013 everything changed. OpenAI, an upstart tech company headed by Altman that had been building so-called large language models (LLMs) for some years, released ChatGPT. The strange thing, though, was that, even weeks earlier, ChatGPT wasn\u2019t a product. OpenAI\u2019s focus was elsewhere \u2013 on GPT-4, the biggest and most powerful model the company had built. This was a machine that could apparently answer almost any question using information gleaned from having \u201cread\u201d everything ever published, but which would sometimes also make stuff up and was therefore deemed not ready for public consumption. Altman, possibly spooked by the fear that a rival company, Anthropic, would launch something big, then made a fateful decision: to release an older, less powerful version of the GPT technology \u2013 GPT-3 with a bolted-on chatbot front end \u2013 and see what happened.<\/p>\n

Continue reading…<\/a>
\nThe fallout from AI\u2019s \u2018Pearl Harbor moment\u2019 has been dramatic. In tech, 12 months can seem like an eternity
\nIf a week is a long time in politics, a year is an eternity in tech. Just over 12 months ago, the industry was humming along in its usual way. The big platforms were deep into what Cory Doctorow calls \u201censhittification\u201d \u2013 the process in which platforms go from being initially good to their users, to abusing them to make things better for their business customers and finally to abusing those customers in order to claw back all the value for themselves. Elon Musk was ramping up his efforts to alienate advertisers on Twitter\/X and accelerate the death spiral of his expensive toy. TikTok was monopolising every waking hour of teenagers. FTX had just gone bankrupt and at least $1bn of investors\u2019 money had gone awol. Here in the UK, the bedraggled online safety bill was wending its way through parliament. And nobody outside the tech world had ever heard of Geoffrey Hinton or Sam Altman.
\nAnd then one day \u2013 30 November 2022, to be precise \u2013 everything changed. OpenAI, an upstart tech company headed by Altman that had been building so-called large language models (LLMs) for some years, released ChatGPT. The strange thing, though, was that, even weeks earlier, ChatGPT wasn\u2019t a product. OpenAI\u2019s focus was elsewhere \u2013 on GPT-4, the biggest and most powerful model the company had built. This was a machine that could apparently answer almost any question using information gleaned from having \u201cread\u201d everything ever published, but which would sometimes also make stuff up and was therefore deemed not ready for public consumption. Altman, possibly spooked by the fear that a rival company, Anthropic, would launch something big, then made a fateful decision: to release an older, less powerful version of the GPT technology \u2013 GPT-3 with a bolted-on chatbot front end \u2013 and see what happened. Continue reading…Technology | The Guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The fallout from AI\u2019s \u2018Pearl Harbor moment\u2019 has been dramatic. In tech, 12 months can seem like an eternity If a week is a long time in politics, a year is an eternity in tech. Just over 12 months ago, the industry was humming along in its usual way. The big platforms were deep into …<\/p>\n

ChatGPT exploded into public life a year ago. Now we know what went on behind the scenes | John Naughton<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":12580,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12579"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12579\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}