OpinionGuest Essay

Credit...Lisa Sheehan

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By Stephen Witt

Mr. Witt is the author of “The Thinking Machine,” a history of the A.I. company Nvidia. He lives in Los Angeles.

When OpenAI released the pioneering artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT in late 2022, no one at the company expected much. Prior attempts at consumer-facing language models had resulted in indifference or even outright hostility. Nick Turley, ChatGPT’s project manager, figured it would last a month. “The entire thesis of ChatGPT was that it was a learning demo that we would wind down, and then we’d use what we learned to build the real product,” he told me recently.

Instead ChatGPT has become perhaps the most successful consumer product in history. In just over three years it has accumulated 800 million weekly active users. It has grown faster than Facebook, faster than Google — faster, in fact, than any other service for which........

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