Synopsis
OpenAI's AI tools, ChatGPT and Codex, now serve nearly a billion users weekly. This marks a significant shift in how people interact with computers, with AI adapting to users. Software engineering is expected to be the first sector to experience disruption. However, this also fuels a new wave of entrepreneurship, lowering barriers for new ideas to become reality.In the post, Brockman framed the usage numbers not as a product milestone but as evidence of how people are changing the way they interact with computers. His core idea: computing has historically required users to translate their goals into instructions the machine can follow. This is now reversing, with the computer increasingly adapting to the user rather than the other way around.
"The rate, scale, and sophistication of problem solving it will do for you will be bound by the amount of compute you have access to," Brockman wrote, adding, "You can build things you would not have attempted before. Small teams can do what used to require much larger ones, and larger ones may be capable of unprecedented feats."
This is one of the ideas that AI-native companies have tried to popularise with AI: smaller teams doing more work. It also then pivots into a conversation about what happens to jobs, if fewer people are made more productive with the help of AI.
According to Brockman, software engineering will be the first domain to feel the impact. He cautioned that this change is likely to be disruptive. "Institutions will change, and the paths and jobs that people assumed were stable may not hold. We don’t know exactly how it will play out and we need to take mitigating downsides very seriously, as well as figuring out how to support each other as a society and world through this time," he wrote.
However, the OpenAI president added that an unexpected consequence of this is a new wave of entrepreneurship. "For the first time, far more people can become who they want to become, with fewer barriers between an idea and a reality," he said.
This also comes as the ChatGPT maker has been consolidating its products. OpenAI confirmed it is working to combine ChatGPT, Codex, and its Atlas browser into a single desktop superapp, with Brockman leading the product overhaul. The company also recently shuttered its video making tool, Sora.
ChatGPT claims the top position in consumer AI, with more than 900 million weekly active users and some 50 million subscribers. OpenAI said that its monthly revenue rate of $2 billion is quickly growing. The startup was valued at $852 billion in a recent funding round that raised $122 billion.
