ChatGPT launched six months ago. Its impact — and fallout — is just beginning

Welcome back to VentureBeat Weekly!?

In this week’s AI Beat, I thought it was worth marking the half-birthday of the world’s most well-known AI chatbot, which got the generative AI hype machine going at full speed. It has already inspired a wave of creative and business applications and become a central part of discussions about ethics, privacy, copyright, data security and misinformation.

—? Sharon Goldman , Senior Writer, VentureBeat

A mere six months ago today, OpenAI released ChatGPT.

Since then, it’s been a dizzying AI ride: The “interactive, conversational model” became the talk of the AI community within days and a global cultural phenomenon within weeks. In a new, unsettling twist, ChatGPT’s massive popularity can also be tied directly to today’s mainstream media headlines like “AI Poses ‘Risk of Extinction,’ Industry?Leaders?Warn,” as leaders from top AI labs like OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic warned in a?22-word?statement?that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

But clearly, the impact — as well as the fallout — of ChatGPT is just beginning. I think it’s worth marking the half-birthday of the world’s most well-known AI chatbot, which got the generative AI hype machine going at full speed. It has already inspired a wave of creative and business applications and become a central part of discussions about ethics, privacy, copyright, data security and misinformation.

ChatGPT has generated comments in?Senate?hearings, inspired fear in?Hollywood, freaked out?teachers?and gotten New York City?lawyers?in trouble — but also made millions excited about the opportunities to boost productivity, efficiency, creative ideation and knowledge management. Words like “hallucinations” and “prompt engineering” have become part of the public discourse, while job displacement concerns have exploded, and policymakers have sprinted to try and catch up to the sudden wave of powerful AI development.

Read the full story.

Read more from?Sharon Goldman, Senior Writer, on?VentureBeat.com.

This is?The AI Beat, one of VentureBeat’s newsletter offerings. Sign up here to?get more stories like this in your inbox?every week.