The future of generative AI is niche, not generalized

Whether or not this really amounts to an "iPhone moment" or a serious threat to Google search isn't obvious at present -- while it will likely push a change in user behaviors and expectations, the first shift will be organizations pushing to bring tools trained on large language models (LLMs) to learn from their own data and services. And this, ultimately, is the key -- the significance and value of generative AI today is not really a question of societal or industry-wide transformation. It's instead a question of how this technology can open up new ways of interacting with large and unwieldy amounts of data and information. OpenAI is clearly attuned to this fact and senses a commercial opportunity: although the list of organizations taking part in the ChatGPT plugin initiative is small, OpenAI has opened up a waiting list where companies can sign up to gain access to the plugins. In the months to come, we will no doubt see many new products and interfaces backed by OpenAI's generative AI systems.