ChatGPT Launch Disrupts Big Tech, Boosts Small Tech

Hopping onto ChatGPT with a question at the moment can be a lottery.

Sometimes the artificial intelligence bot will offer to sift through the internet and come up with definitive answers to your questions, rather than the stream of clickable options we’ve become used to with search engines.  

Other times you’ll find that Chat GPT “is at capacity right now.” That’s because, since launching in November, the technology has been the focus of global attention as the possible new frontier for AI.

Just two months after launch, the chatbot is estimated to have had 100 million monthly active users in January. This makes it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to investment bank UBS.

And as the focus has moved on to chatbots from other innovations that had been capturing the headlines recently -- like non-fungible tokens and the metaverse -- the fallout for technology shares has been swift.

Shares of Microsoft, which backs private company OpenAI which has developed ChatGPT, rose 12% year to date. Google, in contrast, saw $100 billion wiped off its market cap after its own AI chatbot made an error during a demo. 

Meanwhile, shares of smaller AI companies have soared this year, to the extent that some analysts are warning of a possible speculative bubble.

Shares of SoundHound AI, listed on Nasdaq, rose 199% year to date. The company develops speech recognition, natural language understanding, sound recognition and search technologies.

And those of BigBear.ai, which delivers AI-powered analytics and cyber engineering solutions, rose a whopping 481% on the New York Stock Exchange during the same period.