ChatGPT’s answers always sound very plausible. Even if the answer sometimes is complete nonsense at second glance. The AI writes grammatically perfect paragraphs, but it’s the depth and the reflection of the content that still isn’t there. And, as far as I know, AI does not understand irony. So, it is never funny on purpose, only by accident.

As a result, one could argue: ChatGPT is not ready for commercial scale. But this is just the first (public) version. The next version of ChatGPT is supposed to come out this year. People say it will be trained on some hundred times more data. And it will probably be much more sophisticated in terms of how many kinds of different things it can do. If that is the case, discussions about commercial use would immediately intensify.

AI saves time and increases labour productivity per person many times over. So AI has the potential to transform the entire global economy. How much faster will everyone be? Imagine integrating an AI like ChatGPT into the legal system, into medicine, into science, into finance. Into media, into art (already happened), into gaming. You name it. And this is probably happening all at the same time.

Sounds crazy? It is not. I think Yuval Harari mentioned in one of his fantastic books that all the world’s trade in the 15th century could be done today with four or five large container ships. In other words, a person today is perhaps a thousand times more productive on average than a hundred years ago. What will happen if, in the next few years, AI increases that productivity by another hundred times? To be honest, the idea of such acceleration makes my head spin.

This could be huge. A one-stop shop for corporate answers. Imagine a large language model like ChatGPT but for your own corporate data, the ultimate corporate data BFF*.

Imagine having all your org’s info at your fingertips, just a question away. The AI scours through all your PowerPoints, Cloud docs, Wikipedia-style knowledge bases and more and comes back with the perfect answer, summarizing exactly what you should do. No more sifting through endless pages, the AI gives you the gist, backed up with references so you can double-check that the data are adequate.

And the cherry on top? You don’t even have to open a single document – the AI summarizes everything for you. This would be really a whole new level, a reinvention of search.

*Best Friends Forever

I am curious to see which historical comparison will win the race to describe the changes that artificial intelligence is bringing. In the running are comparisons to the “iPhone moment,” the introduction of electricity, or the spread of the Internet. And, of course, the really big one, the comparison with the Industrial Revolution.

These are all events whose implications we humans only understood much later. Or rather, we are still in the process of understanding them. Or will never understand. Why does electricity come out of the socket again, ChatGPT?

In any case, everything will be very different from what we imagine now. Because when you give people a new technology, they do amazing things with it. But rarely exactly what the original intention was. Or as I was just told in the ChatGPT role-playing game “Act if…” Arya Stark just called out to me: “Just as a sword can be used for good or evil, AI can be a tool for truth or deceit. It all depends on our hands.”

Is winter coming? No, I think it will be a fantastic AI-summer.

If you don’t try it, you don’t know what it’s like. One is to philosophize about ChatGPT at the coffee table, the other is to dive in and observe what AI does to you. You must feel it. The whole experience right now is so amazing, so astonishing – and terrifying at the same time.

But why ChatGPT is such a powerful tool, it takes a while to learn how to use it. At first glance it looks very simple, but if you want to get a result of substance, you have to try different things to find relevant prompts.

And you too! Think of Google Maps. It gives people like me, who occasionally get lost in the Old Town’s maze of alleyways, the superpower of being able to navigate home safely with my smartphone. In most places in the world.

AI now gives the average person many additional superpowers. For example, ChatGPT now allows me to write essays on topics I haven’t the faintest idea about. “Hey Chat, could you please write me a short essay on architectural styles in Sweden in the 19th century?” Or ChatGPT will quickly write a message for the bulletin board that would otherwise have taken me 15 minutes. And suddenly I can have ChatGPT write code using natural language commands. A very special superpower.

Not to forget the image generators like DALL-E, which give me the superpower of painting and illustrating, turning my dreams or even nightmares into a finished image in a few seconds.