Sucking the air out the room
One of the most astounding things about the current ChatGPT driven AI hypecycle is how it has pushed almost every other tech conversation to the sidelines
Is there a more thankless task in tech right now than to be a marketer at a tech company without an AI related product right now? You’re about to launch the Widget 5000, the latest generation in your long line of Widgets, that promises lower cost, better efficiency and implements every major feature request your clients have asked for, but no-one cares?
Years of cumulative product and engineering effort in co-ordination with customer success, sales and marketing teams has resulted the final realisation of your company’s grand vision, and all people want to know is if it’s using ChatGPT under the hood?
ChatGPT is the “thing” right now, and has been for a few months. It has pushed every other piece of tech to the sidelines.
News Cycles
ChatGPT is consuming news cycles. Techcrunch publishes at least an article a day referencing ChatGPT. The New York Times published 12 articles in the last week referencing ChatGPT (11 in English, 1 in Spanish), versus 1 article referencing blockchain, 0 referencing web3 and 7 referencing bitcoin. The same trends are true for every mainstream news site, from the Financial Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
Even the Daily Mail had 14 articles referencing ChatGPT in the last week, which is almost Meghan Markle numbers from the tabloid, significant for publication that is very much not tech focused.
Trends
Google Search trends back this up and show that ChatGPT has captured the eyeballs of more than just the tech and tech adjacent communities
Developer Advocates
It’s so much the thing, that we’re seeing AWS Developer Advocates build demos and write blogs on this service, that is built on Azure, has funding from Microsoft, and underpins a number of competitor Microsoft/Github services.
Why would they do that? I think foremost, they’re nerds at heart and playing with the cool thing is fun, but secondly it’s because it’s what people want to learn about.
Some AWS Developer Advocate ChatGPT projects:
Story generation application - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/implementing-an-event-driven-serverless-story-generation-application-with-chatgpt-and-dall-e/
AWS Quiz generator - https://dev.to/banjtheman/how-i-used-gpt-3-to-build-1000-aws-quiz-questions-fdb
ChatAWS - https://twitter.com/banjtheman/status/1645537180905865216?s=20
These are useful projects, and it’s good to see the DA’s being more focused on their community than their employer, but that might all change now with the announcement of Amazon Bedrock.
Press Release
Every new AI service references ChatGPT in their press release. Recent examples include AWS’s new ChatGPT competitor services Amazon Bedrock announcement; or Databricks Dolly 2.0 Open Source Large Language Model announcement.
At time of writing Product Hunt has had over 300 products announcements referencing ChatGPT.
If you want your product announcement to be read or featured in a publication, even if your product doesn’t use ChatGPT, you need to find a way to put those 7 characters in your announcement.
Investment
As the world comes to grips with a post pandemic, post 0% interest rate world, venture capital investment is broadly down. Except for Artificial Intelligence which is bucking the trend.
The New York Times has declared an AI Funding Boom. Crunchbase shows under 700 Artificial Intelligence companies funded since the start of the year until now (18 April 2023), representing just under 9% of all investment.
The funding boom has been led by Microsoft’s mega $10 billion investment into OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, and followed with mega investments into companies like Anthropic AI with $704 million from companies like Google and Salesforce this year.
New startups are getting some of that funding love with Crunchbase showing approximately $559 million invested in Seed and Pre-seed rounds year to date (18 April 2023). Companies like Fixie.ai raising $17million seed funding to build an automation platform for LLM’s riding that ChatGPT wave.
Hype
ChatGPT is driving one the largest hype cycles we’ve ever seen in tech. We know how these play out. While we are still a bit away from the trough of disappointment when it fails to live up to the overinflated expectations, there is consensus that everything has changed. Where this hype cycle differs from others, is that it’s squashing every other hype cycle in it’s way.
Whatever new fancy tech that was getting people excited, just isn’t anymore. If it’s not ChatGPT, not building on ChatGPT, or not competing with ChatGPT, no-one really cares.
I'm glad it's taking the wind out of crypto's sails. Blockchain, as a technology has only a few use cases, not justified by the hype. And, I think, much of the hype with LLMs are warranted.
Good to see you are blogging. I would count myself in the list of DAs experimenting with this technology. I am firmly in the belief that if you want to have at least a reasonable level of credibility when speaking about these sort of things, you should try and get stuck in and find out for yourself.