The politics of ChatGPT

One thing not discussed often enough in the media about Silicon Valley is its politics. It is uniform and monochrome. Most of the billionaires are in total agreement of which party to back (Democrats), which leaders to support (reliable Leftists) and parrot each other on all the major issues like climate change, social justice and the ways to reform the country in particular along with the world in general.

Only a clutchful of billionaires think differently. The most obvious of them is Paypal Mafia don Peter Thiel, who is a clear Republican donating to their causes. Recently “Democrat” Elon Musk has also stepped out of line and seems slightly disillusioned with the ideology that the woke party is propagating.

Another is probably Bill Gates, who goes back from the 1970s and has had his fair share of controversies. When it comes to climate change, he differs totally from the rest of the liberal pack, pushing nuclear energy. That’s something on which he has seen great success in the last few years. Gen IV N-startups look promising, nuclear plants are being fired up again and N-energy has been declared green by the EU.

Usually it is the liberal lobby that dominates. Even Tesla’s success began thanks to huge green government subsidies. But ChatGPT seems to have come from this new lobby. Two of the founders of OpenAI are Musk and Thiel. Reid Hoffman was part of the Paypal Mafia while Sam Altman and Jessica Livingston are from Y Combinator which was associated with Thiel in its early days.

But now the biggest backer is Microsoft and Gates with a reported $10 billion in funding. The integration of Edge, Bing and ChatGPT has taken place and it remains to be seen whether it can challenge the Google monopoly.

It is difficult to believe that Google had a zero market share in search from 1994-97 for the simple reason that it didn’t exist at that time. Even in 2000, the market leaders were Yahoo! and MSN. Google took over in 2001 and has been there for more than 2 decades. It crossed 50% market share in 2006, two-thirds way back in 2008 and was above 90% in 2018. At that time Bing was barely 3.3%.

Interestingly, just around the time ChatGPT came, in 2022-end, Google fell to 83.8% and Bing rose to 9.6%. This is before ChatGPT challenged Google. Now that Bing is getting its act together, it will not topple Google but sure can eat into a good chunk of its search business.

Google’s Bard got off to a disastrous start. Their presentation wasted time showcasing other products, gave a wrong answer and couldn’t find their mobile during a live demo. So much so that their stock price tanked $100 billion during the presentation.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called all this the biggest thing that has happened to his company since the early days of the cloud 15 years ago. “I’ve never ever felt this liberated in terms of opportunity in the days ahead,” he told a US business channel.

Finally, talking of politics, while ChatGPT is a super assistant and can do almost anything, it is about as woke as the average US Leftist teenager. Maybe the creators of ChatGPT, even though they think differently, didn’t want to generate any further controversy in US political circles and are quite happy with a woke AI.