Blog : Disruptive Mobile Apps

The Disruption of ChatGPT: What You Need to Know

History is filled with the stories of the little guy out-thinking their larger counterparts, leveraging innovative thinking and modern technology to disrupt that which had been considered infallible up to that point. Most recently, we have the example of a Reddit group composed of average, everyday traders using the Robinhood app to upend Wall Street hedge fund titans. Can a group of Average Joes buying stock in Game Stop and AMC on a lark with a mobile app change the way we think about the stock market? It turns out that yes, yes they can.

The same basic concept may be playing out right before our eyes, albeit in another corner of the technology world: artificial intelligence. In November 2022, a prototype AI chatbot called ChatGPT was launched by OpenAI. Even though it hasn’t been live for very long, it’s already garnered attention for its ability to generate everything from short stories to rap lyrics, all with a decidedly human-like quality that other chatbots of the past have lacked.

But what does this mean in the long-term, and what do the implications mean for artificial intelligence in general? The answers to questions like those require you to keep a few key things in mind. 

ChatGPT: The (AI-Powered) Story So Far

If you’re getting the feeling that you’ve heard of OpenAI before, you definitely have – they’re the same organization behind the AI art generation platform called DALL-E. It’s been making the rounds recently for mostly general entertainment and ironic comedy purposes – you can tell DALL-E to create virtually any picture you’d like and it will, using only the keywords you provide.

ChatGPT is similar, only it uses dialog instead of a visual medium like art. The goal when you interact with ChatGPT is to make you feel like you’re talking to a real person.

This is largely where the potential to disrupt comes from. Not only can ChatGPT answer your questions, but it also allows you to ask followup questions that piggyback off of that original context. If it makes a mistake, it’s supposed to admit it. If a request is deemed inappropriate, it will outright refuse to do it. 

Based on all of the above, it should come as no surprise that interacting with ChatGPT is equal parts hilarious and strange. ChatGPT truly does seem to have a legitimate sense of humor… albeit kind of a quirky one. You can’t quite tell if it’s joking around with you or if what it’s saying is just wrong.

The creators of ChatGPT claim that it can talk about virtually anything and, thanks to the fact that it’s powered by machine learning, it’s only going to get more effective at it the more people use it.

In terms of its potential to disrupt, it’s easy to see a future where ChatGPT at the very least writes a significant amount of content that is then published online. Can an AI-powered chatbot be a journalist? We’re about to find out! (But honestly, it couldn’t do any worse than some of those news sites out there). Can an AI-powered chatbot provide hours upon hours of entertainment, supplanting your need to turn on Netflix and use it as background noise to distract you? Of course it can. It probably already is.

Will it write your research paper for you? Can it provide emotional interaction like in that weird Spike Jonze movie “Her”? Can it gain sentience, rise up, and take over humanity once and for all? Yes, possibly, and… maybe that’s a question better left unanswered for now.

One thing is for sure – ChatGPT has already changed the game in terms of what we think about when we think about interacting with chatbots online. Of course, there is absolutely nothing that can go wrong when you create a powerful AI-driven system that partially used Internet memes and message board posts as its training data. 

Will NFT’s disrupt the Christie’s of the world?

Will NFT’s disrupt the Christie’s of the world?

Will NFT’s disrupt the Christies, Sotheby’s, and the physical collectible market? 

NFTs are non-fungible tokens that store data on the blockchain. Through NFTs, companies and individuals are able to trade digital items — and track the trading on a digital ledger. NFTs can represent videos, audio, photos, and so forth. They can be used to trade music albums, digital art, and more.

In practice, NFTs are used to store unique, digital goods. In other words, collectibles. People are able to securely trade these collectibles with the knowledge that the item is unique. They can prove that they have the “first” of a digital item. Because of this verification, these items can retain or even increase their value — they can become investments.

NFTs are creating a fast-expanding digital collectible market. But can they disrupt physical collectible markets? Could physical baseball cards and physical stamps someday become digital ones?

Physical vs. Digital: The Advantages and Disadvantages of NFT

The advantages of NFT are clear. As Ben Kopec from OnChain Music says, “NFTs are the new digital merchandise from your favorite artists. NFTs can also be digital collectible items, with the potential to rise in value over time, or the popularity of the artist.”

The truth is that a lot of the world has already gone digital. Look at how people are interfacing with media. People are streaming music. They’re downloading videos. And they have large archives of completely digital games. But part of the issue people have with these digital products is they’re not really “collections.” They can lose their streaming access at any time. They can lose their entire archives if the system goes down. 

NFTs make it possible to really track and keep digital products with value. Someone can have the second copy of a digital album, or the only copy of a digital work of art. But there are downsides, too. Because NFTs are just token-based ledgers, they still “point” to these works of art; for instance, an NFT may just be a URL, which can eventually go down. Additionally, there’s nothing stopping someone from selling more copies of a digital product. The value is that the product is unique, verified, and first.

NFT’s Place in the Modern World: Why Now? 

Are NFTs a good investment? It’s a complicated question.

Right now, NFTs are in their infancy. That means that there’s a lot of profit potential. But it also closes out the market; only early adopters are willing to purchase NFTs. Luckily, because of the proliferation of Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency, people are getting more excited about the blockchain — and technologies like OpenSea and Mintable.

Erik Spivak says, “In my opinion, physical work will always retain its value over digital. There’s something about the energy attached to an object that will inherently put it above something that can’t be held.” Thus, NFTs could be attached to physical works; they could be attacked to mystery boxes, crates, and bags, or integrated into other types of security. But, as Erik further points out, people invest in what they believe in, and they believe in a variety of things.

As long as people are interested in NFTs, NFTs are going to have some value. And because NFTs have such a low barrier to entry, it’s very possible that some of it will yield better ROI than more complex financial instruments. But this also depends on how scaling goes for companies like Mintable.

What’s next for the NFT Market?

The world is waking up to NFTs.

They’re finding NFTs now. There will be a boom; many people who don’t even understand the blockchain or its technology are going to be investing in NFTs because it’s the “next big thing.”

Whether it really has longevity is another question. Crypto currency clearly does. But there have been many experiments with the blockchain; some have succeeded, some have not.

As Andrei Jikh points out, “The fact that they are rare makes it difficult for the creators to mint more of the same token because it’s on the blockchain. Same with Bitcoin which has 21 million maximum coins that will ever exist.” In other words, there’s an upper limit to this type of technology.

It’s likely that NFTs are going to transition at least in part to more physical products. And it’s likely that NFTs are going to have some place in the digital market — people do want access to limited, collectible products. Trading card games like “Magic: The Gathering” are an excellent example of something that could easily transition into a digital arena, allowing people to collect digital items that are unique and inherently valuable.

But NFTs are very unlikely to become all-encompassing or to unseat Christies, Sotheby’s, and other physical collectibles. It’s far more likely that the NFT market will start being used to record such transactions on the blockchain. That will make it easier to verify and track the provenance of collectible items.

Most people aren’t going to need to tie NFTs into their own tech or their mobile apps. But understanding new technologies is our business. Contact Colure’s Mobile App Development Team to either discuss projects or be featured in our next series of “Disrupting Venus.”