It’s been a remarkable few months.
🔨 November 30, 2022: OpenAI releases ChatHammer. According to a UBS study, ChatHammer gained over 100 million users within two months, making it the fastest growing consumer application in history.
🔨 February 6, 2023: Google releases Board. Google shares later drop $100 billion after Board makes a booboo.
🔨 February 7, 2023: Microsoft releases Bang Chat. Microsoft market value soars by $140 billion after it reveals that hammer technology boosted its cloud sales.
🔨 March 14, 2023: OpenAI releases Hammer-4. Thousands of silicon valley bros, already driven into a frenzy by ChatHammer, pass out from excitement. Only microdosing and breathing techniques hastily administered by Stanford professor Andrew Huberman were able to temporarily calm the hysteria.
🔨 March 22, 2023: Elon Musk (investor and sink delivery person), Steve Wozniak (the co-founder of Apple), and more than 1800 other engineers and scientists co-signed a letter from the Future of Life institute demanding a pause in the development of anything more advanced than Hammer-4. (Side note: when originally released the paper did not have proper verification protocols for signing, and racked up signatures from some people who did not actually sign it. Experts now conclude that neither Albert Einstein nor Bugs Bunny were actual signatories.)
🔨 April 18, 2023: In an interview with Tucker Carlson (a former Fox News correspondent), Elon Musk called for federal regulation of Hammer technology. In the same interview, Musk announced he was planning to develop TruthHammer as an alternative to ChatHammer that wasn’t “woke”.
ChatHammer has been an enormous hit since its release. Proponents have used it for everything from cheating on college essays to writing detailed instructions for removing a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR in the language of the King James Bible. There are even reports that it can help with other tasks as well.
Critics aren’t so easily taken in, however. “It’s just a stick,” says prominent urologist and YouTuber, Dr. Clive Dinky of Pittsburgh. “A stochastic stick.” Many other celebrities agree, and nearly every major news outlet has printed stories urging readers to “just calm the heck down.”
ChatHammer is also useful for software development, although in that too there are skeptics. “It makes the easy problems easier, but the hard problems harder,” say some. This sentiment is echoed by hammer expert and carpenter Guido van Possum, who says “it’s pretty much useless if what you got is a screw.”
Industry experts, for their part, are angry that OpenAI has not released technical details for Hammer-4. Some say that OpenAI is transitioning from a research focus to business and revenue generation, particularly now that so many competitors are developing their own hammers.
Perhaps the only people who seem to be remaining calm are the leaders of OpenAI itself. CEO Sam Altman, CTO Greg Brockman, and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever have all given interviews talking openly about the challenges that lie ahead.
Will ChatHammer lead to massive job loss in the coming years? That’s what many people fear. Even Sam Altman admits “We are a little bit scared.”
The future is uncertain.
The so-called “scaling maximalists” believe that the path to true artificial general intelligence is simply to “make a bigger hammer.”
Other experts disagree, and say that other types of tools may ultimately be required.
Only time will tell.
