Simon Hunt

Sam Altman has always been a charmer. At school he revelled in the art of persuasion, joining a school debate team and taking part in national tournaments. After charming his teachers, Altman graduated into charming investors, launching a startup at just 19 before working his way up to become president of Silicon Valley’s premier startup incubator, Y Combinator. Few startups in history have burned through cash as fast as OpenAI, which last year managed to spend more on marketing and employee share options alone than it made in overall sales When he later joined OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, his charm was key to recruiting a team of some of the brightest coders and scientists in the world.

AI has an energy problem: it consumes an awful lot of it. Firms like ChatGPT creator OpenAI demand eye-watering levels of energy to develop their models. Training Chat GPT-3 used as much as 120 American homes over the course of a year, according to one study, while the training of GPT-4 used many multiples more. The International Energy Agency estimates that AI will cause the number of data centres, the warehouses in which their vast training datasets are stored, to double globally at some point in the next ten years. Inevitably, this will also lead to a doubling in the amount of electricity needed to run them.

Until this week, OpenAI seemed like an unstoppable force. In the space of little more than a year, the San Francisco-based organisation was transformed from a research unit on the fringes of the tech industry to the world’s number one dominant AI business.  Every newspaper on the planet seems to have covered the rapid rise of ChatGPT, its flagship AI product. Everyone from software engineers to the local cabbie seems to be using it, with the site attracting in the region of 1.5 billion visits per month.  Control of AI is now firmly concentrated back in the hands of a familiar group of tech behemoths Such was the might of OpenAI that Microsoft quickly wanted in, committing an eye-watering $10 billion (£8 billion) in funding for a stake in the business.

When Mark Zuckerberg's Meta released Threads earlier this month, it looked to be the biggest threat to Twitter in the app’s 17-year history. Over 100 million people signed up within days, a lightning-fast adoption rate that made ChatGPT’s four-week timescale to hit the same milestone seem sluggish. But that threat now appears to be rapidly tailing off. The number of daily active users on the text-based social media app has more than halved from 49 million to 23.6 million in a week, according to an analysis by Similarweb. Last Friday, the number of people using Threads dipped to around 22 per cent of Twitter’s audience, down from its peak a week before of 45 per cent. Is Zuck in danger of losing his fight with Twitter's owner Elon Musk already?

Less than two years ago, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg bet the house on the metaverse. Zuckerberg believed that his virtual reality world was the future. Now, with the rapid progress of Artificial Intelligence (AI), he appears to have made a calamitous mistake. The metaverse isn't yet dead – but it's future looks far from rosy. Having recently taken a trip to the metaverse, I can't say I'm surprised that Zuckerberg's pet project has failed to catch on. At Meta’s shiny new offices in London's King's Cross, large black headsets were strapped over our eyes. Before long, by the wonders of Meta’s technology, we were transported from our real meeting room to a virtual one. Our faces suddenly seemed unfamiliar and we no longer had legs.

When he bought Twitter in October last year, Elon Musk set out a bold vision for the bird app. The billionaire said his acquisition was 'an accelerant' towards building 'X, the everything app,' emulating the functionality of China’s WeChat, with which users can transfer money, play video games, shop online and more. But so far, beyond registering a holding company called X Corp, there are few signs of progress towards this so-called everything app. Musk’s fiercer critics warn he may end up with a nothing app: after gutting most of the company’s workforce and redesignating blue ticks to denote paid subscription instead of notoriety, Twitter’s user experience is rapidly deteriorating. Many users may be tempted to leave if an alternative arrives on the scene.