You know that bit in Arrested Development where Oscar Bluth creates an ImOscar.com (“I’m Oscar….. Dot com”) website? And then every time someone mentions his name, he appends “dot com”?
The internet is reminding me a lot of that sequence ever since GPT-4 came along.
Duolingo Max — it’s Duolingo…
with a chatbot!
The new instacart. It looks like the old instacart
with a chatbot!
Intercom
with a bloody chatbot.
with the world’s most timid chatbot. (Not built with GPT, but in response to it. Shadowing, not surpassing.)
What did we expect?
OpenAI launched ChatGPT, which looked like a chatbot, so everyone is building chatbots. A person holding a hammer tends to see nails. Although in my case, I’d have a lot more questions about why exactly I had ended up holding a hammer in the first place.
Businesses adapt only as much as they have to, and understandably so. If they can tack on a chatbot, remain fundamentally the same at the core, and generate a little more value in the process, why wouldn’t they? Generative AI has the benefit of extending their creative capacity too — at least in terms of quantity. The Duolingo one even looks useful, although does come at an extra cost on top of the other subscription.
