The News

ChatGPT is turning three. Are things going well?

It’s exactly three years since OpenAI launched on ChatGPT on November 30 — or December 1 for the readers of this newsletter — in 2022 and it immediately changed everything (Rest Of).

It’s hard to get your head around how well ChatGPT is going. It’s probably the fastest growing product in human history. 1 million people used it in the first week. Now 800 million people use it every week. ChatGPT has become a verb like Google. Companies are falling over themselves to sign deals to give it to their staff or roll it out to their users. It launched an industry of competing AI companies with their own, mostly same-same products, each jostling for dominance. This race to be the best is transforming the earth (and maybe space) to power it, while intertwining the entire world economy in complex deals and debts (FT, $).

And yet, I can never really remember a popular tech consumer product that so many people actively hate. People have coined words like “slop” and “clankers” to describe things that they hate about what ChatGPT et al. are putting out. Every person and company now has to contend with being inundated with AI-produced bullshit. OpenAI and other AI makers face regulations and lawsuits. Corporate AI might be flatlining (The Economist). OpenAI’s competitors, who have the benefit of printing money in their other successful businesses, are keeping pace and may even be overtaking ChatGPT (FT, $).

There’s definitely a sense that OpenAI is too big to fail. I’m not sure that’s true. Generative AI is clearly here to stay but OpenAI doesn’t have a monopoly on it. It’s a long way from breaking even, let alone making back the hundreds of billions of dollars it is taking from investors. There’s a world in which OpenAI just becomes a brand inside Microsoft like Skype or Xbox. So, there’s no question that we’re living in the world that ChatGPT created. I’m not certain that OpenAI will be the one that reaps the spoils.

Further reading: The World Still Hasn’t Made Sense of ChatGPT (The Atlantic)

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System outages and solar flare bugs ruined the weekend of Australian air travellers

A nationwide passport system outage added to the technical delays facing airports over the last few days (ABC News). Inbound travellers queued up for hours in Sydney and Melbourne airports as Australian Border Force had to manually check passports. This was on top of the “global recall” of Airbus A320s that grounded some Australian flights (ABC News). The reason? Turns out their software had a “vulnerability to solar flares” (Reuters). Oops. Anyway, have a geez at the tablet that Airbus uses to patch the fix:

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The Sizzle wants YOUR tech gift ideas

Here is a public service announcement: there are just three Mondays after today until Christmas. I figured we could all help each other out by coming up with some great tech gift ideas for each other.

So, have you bought something tech-related that’s been great this year?

Is there something that you now buy for others, or can’t imagine life without?

Have you done a painstaking amount of research on a topic that you don’t want to go to waste?

Here’s your chance: Press the button below to go to a form asking for your suggestion (preferred) or send me an email.

I will take submissions all this week and try to put something out early next week!

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Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of the world:

Discuss these links in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Oh, Also

Using the ‘Boob Check’ to test if you’re digitally in Iran

Here’s a question: how would you test if your web traffic was being routed through Iran, perhaps by a CDN? There’s a few ways, I’m sure, but here’s a fun one: X user @hkashfi’s “BOOB CHECK”.

He simply tries to access a URL containing the word boob. In many parts of the world, there would be no issue (in fact I’m told that many people use the internet for a purpose like this). In Iran? The country’s national internet filtering system picks up the “boob” request and says nuh-uh.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electrical & Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

😎 The Sizzle is written by Cam Wilson and emailed every weekday. It was created by Anthony “decryption” Agius.

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The Sizzle is created on Gadigal land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.