Big Tech Is in Crisis. That’s Exactly What It Needed. Pain And AI Will Help In Recovery
Joshua Browder, a 26-year-old entrepreneur from the UK, recently supercharged his main product in a way that he could hardly have imagined a few years ago.
His startup DoNotPay had spent several years developing a chatbot that could negotiate erroneous or excessive fines and fees on behalf of consumers — think unwarranted parking tickets — building a database of expertise based on its history of human interactions.
The bot often needed manual intervention, but in December he had a breakthrough. The bot “talked” to Comcast's online customer service and managed to save someone $120 on their broadband bill. He said it was the first time any such bill had been negotiated purely by AI.
How? Earlier that year Browder got access to GPT-3, a powerful, large language model created by the artificial intelligence company OpenAI. The system understands language better than almost any software before it, and sounds human when it responds. Browder is now planning an AI lawyer that can whisper instructions to people through their earphones when they're in traffic court.
Browder's startup, valued last year at $210 million, is one of a flurry of new services being hastily built on top of generative AI tools with names like GPT-3 and DALL-E. Other services promise to draft emails, spur new marketplaces or even replace Google search. They are coming at a time of broader changes to tech, where a combination of market and regulatory squeezes could make the industry more productive than it has been for years.
The business models of Big Tech, which until recently churned out more than $1 trillion in revenue every year, is coming under strain. The Google and Facebook advertising duopoly is shifting to a market where Amazon.com Inc. and
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