I don’t need to repeat how hot chatgapped is in the first half of 2023. You will see articles like this online, such as ‘Chat Captain veils AI battle mantle, destroy Google like killing Yellow Pages’. Chatgapped is coming, what can migrant workers do if they are trembling? Some people are very anxious, some people celebrate the arrival of new technologies, and you will hear all kinds of voices. It is normal when a new technology appears, all kinds of news are overwhelming. Regardless of the new technology itself, there must be an element of hype. If you look through the old news from 10 years ago, you will find that similar articles have appeared a long time ago. But now, chatgapped has replaced some words at that time. In recent years, the technologies that have received similar treatment include VR, Quantum Computing, metaverse, blockchain, web 3, and so on. Except that VR and Quantum Computing are slowly making progress and blockchain is starting to get a little bit of application in some industries, the rest have not had much result yet. Chatgap is not the first topic to be hyped up, nor will it be the last. There must be a reason behind the speculation. There are interests, fears, grandstanding, and ignorance. From the perspective of investors, when a company has a technology that no one else has, especially one that is believed to have the potential to change the world, its valuation skyrockets. If it is a listed company, its stock price will skyrocket. In 2016, when AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, Google’s stock price skyrocketed. In 2023, when Microsoft invested 10 billion US dollars in OpenAI, accounting for about a third of its stock, Microsoft’s stock price rose by about 10 percent compared to the broader market in a month. Considering that Microsoft is a company with a market value of two trillion dollars, the benefits of its investment are considerable. Even if there are companies in China that have not developed similar products but have the potential of this technology, their stock prices have been rising rapidly in the past few months, and even the increase has far exceeded that of Microsoft. Practitioners, after talking about the investor’s perspective, let’s look at this issue from the perspective of practitioners. The voices of practitioners that we can hear from the media today roughly express two different views. The first is excitement, and then talk about the technical details of GPT, thinking that their opportunity has come. Many people can’t criticize because they will say that you don’t understand technology. In fact, there are also interests behind this. In the past few years, there have been many technicians trying to squeeze into the field of artificial intelligence, but not many can really do the core work and even less benefit from the artificial intelligence fever. Many people who change careers into this field are actually using their hobbies to compete for jobs with many professionals who have been trained for seven or eight years. It is definitely not a wise move. Some people think that by joining the artificial intelligence industry, they can earn other people’s money. In fact, after the mantis catches cicadas and yellow birds, there are other people who really make money. The second type of person is fear. Before, he felt that he was very close to the advanced level of the world, but how could the distance be pulled apart? For fear of falling behind, so he must do something. My thinking is that if the chatgap thing is a direction, it doesn’t make much difference to start working on it one day earlier and one day later. After all, it is much faster to catch up with others than to explore in the dark yourself. Media, there is also a group of voices that cannot be ignored about chatgap’s hype, which is the media. There is a big difference in the treatment of chatgap by the Chinese media and the US media. You have seen a lot of domestic news, so let’s take a look at how the mainstream media in the US evaluated chatgap. The Atlantic reported that chatgap is far dumber than you think, it’s just a toy, not a tool. Business Insider reported that chatgap teaches bad people murder, bomb making. US National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) reported that chatgap produces fake news and misleading information. Of course, there are also reports praising it, but in general, people do not regard it as a god. Some domestic media are very interesting. They translated the reports praising chatgap and then added some sensational reports based on their own limited experience, and even took some experts’ comments out of context. In fact, if you have the heart to dig out the reports of those media on hot technologies in the past 10 years, you will find that the people who speculated about VR, blockchain, metaverse, and autonomous cars were all the same group. Of course, those reports were very eye-catching at the time, but almost no one delved into them afterwards. Here I have a reminder that is don’t just look at media reports every day to invest because you will not see the real money in the world. I see that some domestic technology and business media have a bias against the industry, which is to give most of the space to the internet and AI industry, while ignoring the technological development of other industries. Until today, the market size of the internet in the world is not large, less than one trillion dollars. Companies like Taobao only calculate transaction revenue, not the value of the goods themselves. On the contrary, the market size of the telecommunications industry is about four trillion dollars, the traditional energy market is about two trillion dollars, the medical and health industry is about ten trillion dollars, and the logistics industry is more than 12 trillion dollars. One dollar for every eight dollars of GDP is logistics. However, the logistics industry, the energy industry, and even the telecommunications industry have far less presence in domestic technology and business media than the internet industry. Ordinary people, finally let’s take a look at the reaction of ordinary people. To put it bluntly, many people see chatgap as a new god and think it is omnipotent. In history, the Native Americans back then were deceived by Columbus, or rather taken advantage of, but they regarded Columbus as a god at the time because with their knowledge reserves, they couldn’t understand the reason behind the new thing called lunar eclipse. For a new technology, especially a new technology whose content cannot be understood from its name, it is normal to have a similar reaction to the indigenous people at first. But today, almost everyone has been educated for at least 12 years, and their reaction to a new thing is still so enthusiastic, which is a bit overdone. In history, there are actually sequels to the story of Columbus. 18 years later, in 1521, Magellan sailed around the world to the Philippines, where he was initially treated like Columbus and deified by the local natives. But soon, the locals found out that he was not a god and killed him in the conflict. In the past decade, the same people who later denigrated VR, blockchain, and the metaverse were the same people who deified them in the first place. Before the Great Depression in 1929, when shoeshine kids on the streets of New York sold stocks to Joseph Kennedy, President Kennedy’s father, Kennedy Siesta knew something was wrong. Today, when people who have never worked in the computer industry start talking about AI, feel they know better than professionals, and even start pointing fingers at people in the computer field, we have to be wary. Next section preview, you may think that this talk pours cold water on chatgap, a bit hard. In fact, I am not saying that chatgap technology is not viable, but through various aspects of analysis, let you have a more rational and comprehensive view of it, and don’t fall into a frenzy together. Realistically speaking, chatgap is neither as magical nor as scary as many people make it out to be, but it’s not useless either.
