Students are using it draft essays, therapists experimenting with it can for counselling, it is passing MBA exams with consummate ease with universities panicking and contemplating going back to handwritten exams. It seems to write instant sonnets and haikus on the Second World War, the Webb Telescope and makki-ki-roti with equal effortlessness. It has rocketed to 100mn users in a mere two months; Twitter took five plodding years and even the WWW took seven! ChatGPT is the poster boy of a larger movement in AI, called Generative AI (GenAI), sometimes also referred to as Large Language Models, Foundation Models, or Transformers. Other well-known manifestations of Generative AI are DALL E2 and Stable Diffusion which transform prompts into spectacular art, and the text-generator GPT3, which is where ChatGPT originated from. The spectacular performance of Generative AI has people wondering and whether it will replace search and fearing whether it will take away the jobs of artists, programmers, consultants, and journalists.

When Silicon Valley insiders say that ChatGPT and generative AI are "the next platform," here's what they mean: Why it matters: Any new technology that checks all these boxes and keeps springing new surprises on us earns the world's attention -- as previous platforms did, from the iPhone to the internet itself all the way back to the rise of the personal computer. The big picture: The tech industry has sounded trumpets in the past few years for "next platform" candidates that haven't yet delivered on their promises. But a great many people with long views believe that the AI shift is different -- and for real. Steven Sinofsky is a former Microsoft executive who sounded an alarm to Bill Gates in 1994 about the internet's disruptive potential. He notes that AI can speed into our lives using existing devices and services. Be smart: In the social media world, "platform" has come to mean a stage for users to speak from.

Generative AI is the biggest and hottest trend in AI (Artificial Intelligence) at the start of 2023. While generative AI has been around for several years, the arrival of ChatGPT (a conversational AI tool for all business occasions, built and trained from large language models) has been like a brilliant torch brought into a dark room, illuminating many previously unseen opportunities. Every business wants to get on board with ChatGPT, to implement it, operationalize it, and capitalize on it. It is important to realize that the usual "hype cycle" rules prevail in such cases as this. First, don't do something just because everyone else is doing it – there needs to be a valid business reason for your organization to be doing it, at the very least because you will need to explain it objectively to your stakeholders (employees, investors, clients).