- Nvidia seeing increased demand for GPUs for large language models
- Potential to disrupt Google’s search market
Technologies only get noticed when a clear consumer use emerges. Earlier this year, The ‘AlphaFold’ algorithm employed by Alphabet’s (US:GOOGL) subsidiary DeepMind predicted all known protein structures. Before AlphaFold, scientists could predict 190,000; now they can predict more than 200mn. For people in the field, this was remarkable, but without any immediate consumer applications it drifted through the public consciousness without much attention.
However, as soon as ChatGPT was released by research laboratory OpenAI, the impact it might have on people’s daily lives was obvious. ChatGPT is a language artificial intelligence (AI) programme that converses with users via text. It is based on the GPT-3 programme first released by OpenAI in 2020 and gives responses to questions, in addition to de-bugging code and writing poetry (allegedly). The programme was released to the public at the beginning of December and accumulated more than 1mn users within a week. It took Twitter and Facebook 24 months and 10 months, respectively, to achieve the same number of users.