It is the boss of OpenAI (ChatGPT) himself who admits it: the tech industry probably got ahead of itself a little too quickly. Faced with the inertia of the economy and the public’s deeply rooted habits, the large-scale adoption of artificial intelligence will ultimately take much more time than expected.
Artificial intelligence is going to change everything, and very quickly. At least, that is the impression one gets, given the ever-growing place this new technology is taking in culture and in everyone’s daily life. Yet the reality of the market seems to be catching up with the most optimistic forecasts, and one of the main architects of this revolution has today just revised his views.
The force of economic inertia
The CEO of OpenAI (ChatGPT, among others) recently admitted that he may have been wrong, and that AI will not become part of everyday habits as quickly as indispensable technologies like the iPhone or the Google search engine did. “I think I was wrong on several points,” Altman recently said into the microphone of podcaster David Senra. One of those points is simply that the economy has strong inertia. People keep doing the same things... They still buy from the same companies and want to keep using their tools in the same way. I think this is actually positive in many respects: it will make the great transition ahead more gradual and slower, and I am grateful for that. But it means, I think, that we have all been too ambitious about the timelines...”.
The challenge of convincing the general public
He also admits that the technology sector has not yet managed to convince the general public of its vision of the future: “As a sector, we have not done a very good job of explaining to people what the benefits of AI are and how its drawbacks can be mitigated”.