ChatGPT proves AI is finally mainstream — and things are only going

A friend of mine texted me earlier this week to ask what I thought of ChatGPT. I wasn’t surprised he was curious. He knows I write about AI and is the sort of guy who keeps up with whatever’s trending online. We chatted a bit, and I asked him: “and what do you think of ChatGPT?” To which he replied: “Well, I wrote a half-decent Excel macro with it this morning that saved me a few hours at work” — and my jaw dropped.

For context: this is someone whose job involves a fair bit of futzing around with databases but who I wouldn’t describe as particularly tech-minded. He works in higher education, studied English at university, and never formally learned to code. But here he was, not only playing around with an experimental AI chatbot but using it to do his job faster after only a few days’ access.

“I asked it some questions, asked it some more, put it into Excel, then did some debugging,” is how he described the process. “It wasn’t perfect but it was easier than Googling.”

Stories like this have been accumulating this week like the first spots of rain gathering before a downpour. Across social media, people have been sharing stories about using ChatGPT to write code, draft blog posts, compose college essays, compile work reports, and even improve their chat-up game (okay, that last one was definitely done as a joke, but the prospect of AI-augmented rizz is still tantalizing). As a reporter who covers this space, it’s been basically impossible to keep up with everything that’s happening, but there is one overarching trend that’s stuck out: AI is going mainstream, and we’re only just beginning to see the effect this will have on the world.

There’s a concept in AI that I’m particularly fond of that I think helps explain what’s happening. It’s called “capability overhang” and refers to the hidden capacities of AI: skills and aptitudes latent within systems that researchers haven’t even begun to investigate yet. You might have heard before that AI models are “black boxes” — that they’re so huge and complex that we don’t fully understand how they operate or come to specific conclusions. This is broadly true and is what creates this overhang.

“Today’s models are far more capable than we think, and our techniques available for exploring [them] are very juvenile,” is how AI policy expert Jack Clark described the concept in a recent edition of his newsletter. “What about all the capabilities we don’t know about because we haven’t thought to test for them?”

Capability overhang is a technical term, but it also perfectly describes what’s happening right now as AI enters the public domain. For years, researchers have been on a tear, pumping out new models faster than they can be commercialized. But in 2022, a glut of new apps and programs have suddenly made these skills available to a general audience, and in 2023, as we…