I'm also of the opinion this came at a uniquely bad time. Late 2022 was in fact a really terrible time for this kind of paradigm-altering technology to hit the scene. I'm of the opinion that the suffocating dominance of AI in the public consciousness would not have been nearly as bad if this had debuted in, say, 2018.
And this has so very much to do with the stock price of big tech companies.
I've put the tickers for Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook together in this chart.
I feel like mentioning inside the tech world, the initial dip at the start of the Covid pandemic was "scary" for those obsessed with their stock's value. You'll notice that is essentially a blip in early 2020, which then led into even more aggressive, even more meteoric stock rises through 2022.
You'll then notice all these companies spent the entirety of 2022 careening downward, because "recession" was the scary talk of the town, and tech stocks tend to be highly speculative, which lends them to behaving really well then things look good, and really poorly when things look bad.
ChatGPT debuted at the very end of 2022. And it debuted into an environment where every single massive tech company was panicking.
And it was weird to witness this from the inside, honestly. It's not a secret that I work for Microsoft. Microsoft's blue line in this chart was confidently up-up-up from when I joined in 2018 through 2022. And the climate, and the direction, of things was steady. The business model was steady. Big decisions were not flung around at random. There was pacing and planning around things.
But 2022 was a freefall panic across big tech. And AI was the one golden rope to pull themselves up with (or hang all of us with. Same thing. Really.)
ALL of that recovery from early 2023 through now? That is ALL riding on AI. The eggs are so thoroughly in one basket. This was a panic decision to pump everything everything everything into AI because it made investors excited and all all the big tech leaders were acting like scared beaten dogs fresh off their 2022 whipping, with only a single-minded purpose to yank themselves up on the AI bandwagon and try to do it better than everyone else.
It's also no secret I hate my job right now because I'm one "Touched Stove, Burned Hand" too deep into this with big asks and big products with tight deadlines getting scrapped into mulch because no one actually thought this through. The only driving force is to do AI faster and more than everyone else. Everyone is actively searching for problems to exist that AI can be slapped onto because it's the entire economy's bet right now. It needs to exist to retroactively justify the investment and keep the Atlassian weight of the economy propped up on AI shoulders.
Anyway. Anyway. I don't think this absolute blind panic, blind adoption, integration into Everything Everywhere As Much As Possible would have happened to NEARLY this scale if ChatGPT came out in 2018, or 2019, or 2020.
I do still think it would be widely used and widely popular, but perhaps more in the vein of smart phones becoming popular and adopted. There would have been a moment to breathe here and there. Every tech CEO would probably not be such an absolute sputtering madman about it, not nearly to this degree.
