Issue #77 The first corporate AI victim
Remember that Chat GPT thing and the idea that maybe someday, perhaps, it could do things like threaten jobs and change the world?
Well… it’s happening.
More on that in a second.
First, some Updates:
- 💬 The feedback on our daily Linkedin checklist has been great, so if you sadly missed our planning (and the amazing dinner), here it is.
🤖 Want to stay a step ahead of the AI Tsunami? Check out this group. Cristina gave an inspiring/frightening talk at our planning session, and this is a train worth jumping on. - 📣Podcast: Build your business around a user obsession (and other sage advice) from Antoine Jebara, Co-founder of JumpCloud. Listen here.
So, back to the big story: have you ever heard of Chegg?
Chegg is basically a college cheating website. They started renting books, then started “helping” with homework.
And test questions.
And writing assignments.
They even figured out how to trick Turnitin a plagiarism-checking service, which earned the company the accusation of “institutionalizing” cheating.
Sounds shady, but they’re publicly traded, and on May 1, they were worth about $2.1 billion.
Then their CEO said that Chat GPT is slowing their growth – suddenly, they were worth $1 billion.
And analysts started talking about the end of Chegg.
And that’s not all.
At about the same time, IBM’s CEO announced that he expects AI to replace 7,800 jobs at IBM.
And one of the key sticking points for the striking writers is that they don’t want to play second fiddle to an AI lead writer.
Of course, there’s the other side: while all of this was going on, Samsung kicked Chat GPT to the curb: Coders were using Chat GPT to fix their code – so they were sharing sensitive code with OpenAI and Microsoft.
So what does this all mean?
Chat GPT is the fastest-growing internet app ever.
6 months in, and a publicly traded company is on the ropes; Big Blue is replacing its staff, and writers are worried about overlords.
Now: what will the next six months be?
I’d love to hear your thoughts here.
Yours in intelligence,
Jeff
🙋🏽Have Business Questions?
Ask them here: register a question, we’ll do our best to find an answer, and we’ll talk about these questions on May 12… at 11AM.
The meeting link (and reminders) will go out to Insiders in a separate email.