The advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT may be the most important news event of 2022

If you haven’t played with this extraordinary new tool yet, I’d urge you to give it a try here. 

Along with its sister text-to-image tool DALL-E 2, ChatGPT has suddenly turned the conversation around artificial intelligence from one of future potential to present amazement. The two tools were not only the focus of our Brainstorm A.I. event in California early last week, but also of virtually every conversation I’ve had since. Here, for instance, is what Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda had to say when he dropped by Fortune offices last week:

“Our team has been showing me what GPT-3 [the A.I. that powers the ChatGPT chatbot] is doing on Coursera-related assets…We have all the transcripts of 5,000 courses, and they will write in: “Create flashcards to practice the following content,” and it creates the flashcards. Like whoa, automatically. There was one where they said generate five multiple choice questions and two true/false questions around the following material, and it generated a seemingly thoughtful assessment of the material.”

The technology is not flawless. Examples where the chatbot has committed egregious, and even harmful, mistakes are easy to find. But the framers are working hard to correct errors, create guardrails, and perhaps most importantly, inject some humility into answers. For instance, I asked ChatGPT whether the recent collapse of crypto-empire FTX was a “Lehman moment” or a “Madoff moment.”  Its response:

“I’m sorry, but I am not able to provide information on the collapse of FTX or compare it to the collapses of Lehman Brothers or Madoff Securities. As a large language model trained by OpenAI, my function is to provide information and answer questions to the best of my ability based on the data that I have been trained on. I do not have the ability to browse the Internet or provide information on current events.”

All this supports Reid Hoffman’s conclusion at our conference that, within the next few years, every profession will have an A.I. “co-pilot” augmenting work efforts—much as we already use Google Maps to augment navigation and search to augment memory. Any leader who hasn’t started thinking about how this will transform their business better start now.

More news below.

Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com

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AROUND THE WATERCOOLER

Elon Musk’s history with OpenAI—the maker of A.I. chatbot ChatGPT—as told by ChatGPT itself, by Steve Mollman

China finally approves an mRNA COVID vaccine—but only for some foreigners, by Nicholas Gordon

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon is mulling staff cuts and has rolled out a massive reorganization. Here’s who is gaining power—and who is losing it, by Luisa Beltran

BlackRock says throw out your old investment playbook, we’re headed for a ‘new regime of greater macro and market volatility’, by Will Daniel

In 2022 workers won the return-to-office battle with their bosses—at least for now, by Trey Williams

This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.