Will ChatGPT Make Us All “Centaurs”?

(Original post at Searchblog) Watching the hype cycle build around OpenAI’s ChatGPT, I can’t help but wonder when the first New York Times or Atlantic story comes out calling the top — declaring the whole thing just another busted Silicon Valley fantasy, this year’s version of crypto or the metaverse. Anything tagged as “the talk of Davos” is destined for a ritual media takedown, after all. We’re already seeing the hype start to fade, with stories reframing ChatGPT as merely a “co-pilot” that helps everyone from musicians to coders to regular folk create better work.

But I think there’s far more to the story. There’s something about ChatGPT that feels like a seminal moment in the history of tech — the launch of the Mac in 1984, for example, or the launch of the browser one decade later. Is this a fundamental, platform-level innovation that could unleash a new era in digital?

Possibly, but the simpler co-pilot concept also resonates. It reminds me of a conversation I had over the course of a year or so with Rob Reid, the author of the prescient 2017 novel After On. AI plays a central role in the novel, and Reid introduces the concept of “centaurs” — creatures that are part human, part AI — borrowed from Garry Kasparov, who imagined merging with Deep Blue’s chess AI back in 2014. More colloquially, Rob and I drained more than a few bourbons imagining how AI…