Since its launch in November, OpenAI’s advanced AI chatbot ChatGPT has attracted a great deal of attention.
According to the Financial Times, the headlines and hype have helped fuel a surge in artificial intelligence-related shares, which could even turn into a speculative ‘bubble’.
Ask ChatGPT itself what it does and it replies that it “uses deep learning techniques to generate human-like responses to text inputs in a conversational manner”.
Headline-grabbing feats have included passing graduate-level exams for business, law and medical school, and writing poetry in the style of William Shakespeare.
There are also plenty of practical applications, and the model has been mentioned in earnings calls from a range of different businesses, from oil giants and banks to the world’s leading construction equipment manufacturer, Caterpillar.
It has also sparked criticism and ethical debates, with fears that ChatGPT and other generative AI could lead to a loss of jobs, cheating in exams, plagiarism, the potential to be used to generate malicious code, and a range of other issues.
Analysts at Morgan Stanley believe that the area is showing “all the usual hallmarks of hype”, including polarised coverage in the media and the formation of echo chambers on social media.
Many companies are benefitting from the surge of interest in AI
There’s no doubting that a lot of companies are benefitting from the interest, however.
Buzzfeed’s stock soared by 150% in a single day when chief executive Jonah Peretti announced that they would soon start to use AI-generated content on the site.
Smaller companies working in AI and offering or developing a wide range of AI-related services have also benefitted in the surge of interest spearheaded by ChatGPT.
The Financial Times reports that shares in SoundHound AI have increased by 94% already this month, for example, with the company specialising in ‘speech to meaning’ technology.
Shares in BigBear.ai have increased more than fivefold since the start of the year, while C3.ai stocks have doubled, with an increase of 103%.
There are no signs yet of the market slowing as data provider VandaTrack said that it expected the speculation to continue – as long as macroeconomic conditions remain favourable.
While numerous companies are riding the wave, however, ChatGPT is currently out in front.
The app drew around 100 million monthly active users in January alone and continues to be the most talked-about player in generative AI, despite the launch of Google owner Alphabet’s own conversational AI service, Bard.
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