Sam Altman, co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenAI Inc., speaks during TechCrunch Disrupt 2019 in San Francisco, California, on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2019.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
For his day job, Tobias Zwingmann is the managing partner of RAPYD.AI, a German consulting firm that helps clients make use of artificial intelligence. On the side, Zwingmann teaches online courses on AI.
Lately, Zwingmann has been generating lecture notes using ChatGPT, a new chatbot that’s quickly become the latest fad in tech. Zwingmann said he recently asked ChatGPT to explain the mechanisms and workings of a machine learning technology known as a DBSCAN, which is short for density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise, because he is too “lazy to write it all down.”
“I went up and said, ‘OK, tell me a detailed step by step of how the DBSCAN algorithm works,’ and it gave me that step by step,” Zwingmann said.
After a little bit of polishing and editing, Zwingmann said the lecture notes were in good shape.
“This took me like 30 minutes, and before that I would have spent the whole day,” Zwingmann said. “I can’t neglect that this has proven to be hugely beneficial.”
ChatGPT debuted in late November and has quickly turned into a viral sensation, with people tweeting questions, such as “Are NFTs dead,” and requests like, “Tell a funny joke about the tax risks of international remote work.” They include a screenshot of ChatGPT’s response, which often — but not always — makes sense.
The technology was developed by San Francisco-based OpenAI, a research company led by Sam Altman and backed by Microsoft, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Khosla Ventures. ChatGPT automatically generates text based on written prompts in a fashion that’s much more advanced and creative than the chatbots of Silicon Valley’s past.
In a year that’s turned into a dud for the technology sector, with mass layoffs, wrecked stock prices and crypto catastrophes dominating the headlines, ChatGPT has served as a reminder that innovation is still happening.
Tech executives and venture capitalists have gushed about it on Twitter, some even comparing it to Apple’s debut of the iPhone in 2007. Five days after OpenAI released ChatGPT, Altman said that the chat research tool “crossed 1 million users!”
Back in 2016, tech giants like Facebook, Google and Microsoft were trumpeting digital assistants as the next evolution of human and computer interaction. They boasted of the potential for chatbots to order Uber rides, buy plane tickets and answer questions in a life-like manner.
Six years later, progress has been slow. The majority of chatbots that people interact with are still relatively primitive, only capable of answering rudimentary questions on corporate help desk pages or minimally helping frustrated customers understand why their cable bills are so high.
But with early ChatGPT adopters demonstrating the technology’s ability to carry a conversation through multiple queries in addition to generating software code, the world of so-called natural language processing appears to be entering a new phase.
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It’s part of the larger trend. Tech investors are pouring billions of dollars in startups specializing in the field of generative AI, which refers to the ability of computers to automatically create text, videos, photos and other media using cutting-edge machine learning technologies.
Brendan Burke, an analyst at tech industry data firm PitchBook, said a number of early-stage investors have turned their attention from cryptocurrencies and related concepts like web3 to generative AI technologies.
“That’s a trend that is perceptible,” Burke said.
According to PitchBook, the top firms in the space are Khosla, David Sacks’ Craft Ventures, Sequoia, Entrepreneur First out of the U.K. and Lux Capital. Investors have also noticed on platforms like GitHub that many web3 developers have shifted their attention from NFTs and crypto projects to open-source generative AI initiatives, Burke said.
“I think that’s a sign of some of the rethinking that’s going on throughout the early-stage market,” Burke said.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is essentially a variant of OpenAI’s popular GPT-3.5 language-generation software that’s been designed to carry conversations with people. Some of its features include answering follow-up questions, challenging incorrect premises, rejecting inappropriate queries and even admitting its mistakes, according to an OpenAI summary of the language model.
ChatGPT was trained on an enormous amount of text data. It learned to recognize patterns that enable it to produce its own text mimicking various writing styles, said Bern Elliot, a vice president at Gartner. OpenAI doesn’t reveal what precise data was used for training ChatGPT, but the company says it generally crawled the web, used archived books and Wikipedia.
OpenAI declined to comment for this story.
Elliot said that for now ChatGPT is more of a way for OpenAI to gain publicity and to show what’s possible for large language models, as opposed to a useful piece of software for businesses to incorporate. While ChatGPT is free, OpenAI sells access to its underlying language and related AI models for businesses to use.
“ChatGPT, as currently conceived, is a parlor trick,” Elliot said. “It’s something that isn’t actually itself going to solve what people need, unless what they need is sort of a distraction.”
However, Zwingmann isn’t alone in using ChatGPT for more advanced purposes.
Cai GoGwilt, the chief technology officer of digital contract management startup Ironclad, said his company is exploring how ChatGPT could be used to summarize changes to legal documents. The feature would be helpful for the startup’s legal clients, who routinely alter documents and then notify their colleagues after they made the changes, GoGwilt said.
GoGwilt said ChatGPT offers “more creative” responses compared to similar language models developed by big tech companies. Meta’s AI language tool, dubbed RoBERTa, seems more capable at categorizing and labeling text, GoGwilt said, adding that his company uses both GPT and RoBERTa to power certain features in its digital document software.
At legal research and data company LexisNexis, Min Chen, a vice president, said in an email that she and her team are just starting to test ChatGPT although they already use OpenAI’s GPT-3 software through Microsoft’s Azure cloud.
Chen said GPT-3 is more suitable for LexisNexis because it’s an enterprise product and can be customized. However, her team has been experimenting with ChatGPT and she said it sometimes generates “sensible answers” that are “very impressive.” Still, it has its flaws.
“I am afraid it’s not reliable enough as a decision-making tool for serious legal research,” Min said. “In some cases, ChatGPT will give a very verbose answer that seems to make sense, but the answer is not getting the facts right.”
There’s also the bias problem, which is true for many kinds of AI-powered software.
As Mozilla senior fellow Abeba Birhaneshared on Twitter, ChatGPT produced song lyrics that implied women who wear lab coats are “probably just there to clean the floor,” whereas men wearing lab coats “probably got the knowledge and skills you’re looking for.”
Regarding ChatGPT’s limitations, OpenAI said in a blog post that while the firm is working to mitigate bias problems, the software “will sometimes respond to harmful instructions or exhibit biased behavior.”
Altman said in a tweet over the weekend that ChatGPT is “incredibly limited” and “it’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now.”
Krishna Gade, CEO of AI model monitoring startup Fiddler, said ChatGPT and related language technologies could lead to big “disruptions in web search,” an area long dominated by Google.
Gade, who previously worked at Microsoft’s Bing search unit, said if ChatGPT’s popularity continues to grow along with other chat-based tools that answer questions, Google may have to update its core search technology to more prominently center on chat.
ChatGPT’s rising popularity shows there is a segment of the population that prefers getting information via question and answers as opposed to a typical search query.
Google parent Alphabet has plenty of AI talent and has helped develop some of the core AI technologies used to create systems like ChatGPT. The search engine is also a habit that’s very difficult to displace.
As Zwingmann notes, Google still has a major advantage over ChatGPT.
“The way it works currently is people use ChatGPT and then go to Google to verify the results,” Zwingmann said, with a laugh.
Here’s what happened when we typed in, “Write me a news story about ChatGPT in the style of CNBC.”
As of December 13, 2022, ChatGPT, the new language processing AI from OpenAI, is making waves in the tech industry. The advanced model, which is trained to generate human-like text, is already being hailed as a game-changer for businesses that rely on natural language processing.
ChatGPT’s ability to understand and respond to a wide range of topics has been particularly impressive, with some even suggesting that it has the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with technology. Many experts believe that ChatGPT’s advanced capabilities will be a valuable asset for companies in fields such as customer service, online education, and market research.
One of the key advantages of ChatGPT is its ability to learn and adapt quickly to new information. This means that it can be trained to handle new topics and tasks without the need for extensive retraining. Additionally, ChatGPT is highly scalable, which makes it well-suited for use in large-scale applications. So far, the response to ChatGPT has been overwhelmingly positive, with many praising its advanced capabilities and ease of use. It remains to be seen how ChatGPT will be used in the coming years, but it’s clear that it has the potential to be a major player in the world of natural language processing.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Apple CEO Tim Cook shake hands on the day they present Apple’s announcement of a $100 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 6, 2025.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
Apple shares rose 13% this week, its largest weekly gain in more than five years, after CEO Tim Cook appeared with President Donald Trump in the White House on Wednesday.
Shares of the iPhone maker rose 4% to close at $229.35 per share on Friday for the company’s largest weekly gain since July 2020. The week’s move added over $400 billion to Apple’s market cap, which now sits at $3.4 trillion.
At the White House on Wednesday, Cook appeared with Trump to announce Apple’s plans to spend $100 billion on American companies and American parts over the next four years.
Apple’s plans to buy more American chips pleased Trump, who said during the public meeting that because the company was building in the U.S., it would be exempt from future tariffs that could double the price of imported chips.
Investors had worried that some of Trump’s tariffs could substantially hurt Apple’s profitability. Apple warned in July that it expected over $1 billion in tariff costs in the current quarter, assuming no changes.
“Apple and Tim Cook delivered a masterclass in managing uncertainty after months and months of overhang relative to the potential challenges the company could face from tariffs,” JP Morgan analyst Samik Chatterjee wrote on Wednesday. He has an overweight rating on Apple’s stock.
Cook’s successful White House meeting also comes two weeks after Apple reported June quarter earnings in which overall revenue jumped 10% and iPhone sales grew by 13%.
In an aerial view, the Tesla headquarters is seen in Austin, Texas, on July 24, 2025.
Brandon Bell | Getty Images
Tesla has been granted a permit to run a ride-hailing business in Texas, allowing the electric vehicle maker to compete against companies including Uber and Lyft.
Tesla Robotaxi LLC is licensed to operate a “transportation network company” until August 6, 2026, according to a listing on the website of the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, or TDLR. The permit was issued this week.
Elon Musk’s EV company has been running a limited ride-hailing service for invited riders in Austin since late June. The select few passengers have mostly been social media influencers and analysts, including many who generate income by posting Tesla fan content on platforms like X and YouTube.
The Austin fleet consists of Model Y vehicles equipped with Tesla’s latest partially automated driving systems. The company has been operating the cars with a valet, or human safety supervisor in the front passenger seat tasked with intervening if there are issues with the ride. The vehicles are also remotely supervised by employees in an operations center.
Musk, who has characterized himself as “pathologically optimistic,” said on Tesla’s earnings call last month that he believes Tesla could serve half of the U.S. population by the end of 2025 with autonomous ride-hailing services.
The Texas permit is the first to enable Tesla to run a “transportation network company.” TDLR said Friday that this kind of permit lets Tesla operate a ride-hailing business anywhere in the state, including with “automated motor vehicles,” and doesn’t require Tesla to keep a human safety driver or valet on board.
Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
As CNBC previously reported, Tesla robotaxis were captured on camera disobeying traffic rules in and around Austin after the company started its pilot program. None of the known incidents have been reported as causing injury or serious property damage, though they have drawn federal scrutiny.
In one incident, Tesla content creator Joe Tegtmeyer reported that his robotaxi failed to stop for a train crossing signal and lowering gate-arm, requiring a Tesla employee on board to intervene. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has discussed this incident with Tesla, a spokesperson for the regulator told CNBC by email.
Texas has historically been more permissive of autonomous vehicle testing and operations on public roads than have other states.
A new law signed by Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott goes into effect this year that will require AV makers to get approval from the state before starting driverless operations. The new law also gives the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles the authority to revoke permits if AV companies and their cars aren’t complying with safety standards.
Tesla’s AV efforts have faced a number of challenges across the country, including federal probes, product liability lawsuits and recalls following injurious or damaging collisions that occurred while drivers were using the company’s Autopilot and FSD (Full Self-Driving) systems.
A jury in a federal court in Miami last week determined that Tesla should hold 33% of the liability for a fatal Autopilot-involved collision.
And the California DMV has sued Tesla, accusing it of false advertising around its driver assistance systems. Tesla owners manuals say the Autopilot and FSD features in their cars are “hands on” systems that require a driver ready to steer or brake at any time. But Tesla and Musk have shared statements through the years saying that a Tesla can “drive itself.”
Since 2016, Musk has been promising that Tesla would soon be able to turn all of its existing EVs into fully autonomous vehicles with a simple, over-the-air software update. In 2019, he said the company would put 1 million robotaxis on the road by 2020, a claim that helped him raise $2 billion at the time from institutional investors.
Those promises never materialized and, in the robotaxi market, Tesla lags way behind competitors like Alphabet’s Waymo in the U.S. and Baidu’s Apollo Go in China.
Tesla shares are down 18% this year, by far the worst performance among tech’s megacaps.
Shares of The Trade Desk plummeted almost 40% on Friday and headed for their worst day on record after the ad-tech company announced the departure of its CFO and analysts expressed concerns about rising competition from Amazon.
The Trade Desk, which went public in 2016, suffered its steepest prior drop in February, when the shares fell 33% on a revenue miss. In its second-quarter earnings report late Thursday, the company beat expectations on earnings and revenue, but the results failed to impress investors.
The Trade Desk, which specializes in providing technology to companies that want to target users across the web, said finance chief Laura Schenkein is leaving the job and being replaced by Alex Kayyal, who has been working as a partner at Lightspeed Ventures.
While some analysts were uneasy about the sudden change in the top finance role, the bigger concern is Amazon’s growing role in the online ad market, as well as the potential impact of President Donald Trump’s tariffs on ad spending.
Amazon has emerged as a significant player in the digital advertising market in recent years, and is now third behind Google and Meta. Last week, Amazon reported a 23% increase in ad revenue for the second quarter to $15.7 billion, which beat estimates.
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Amazon’s ad business has largely been tied to its own platforms, with brands paying up so they can get discovered on the sprawling marketplace. However, Amazon’s demand-side platform (DSP), which allows brands to programmatically place ads across a wider swath of internet properties, is gaining more resonance in the market.
“Amazon is now unlocking access to traditionally exclusive ‘premium’ ad inventory across the open internet, validating the strength of its DSP and suggesting The Trade Desk’s value proposition could erode over time,” Wedbush analysts wrote on Friday.
The Wedbush analysts lowered their rating on The Trade Desk to the equivalent of hold from buy, and cited Amazon’s recent ad integration with Disney as a sign of the company’s aggressiveness.
Executives at The Trade Desk were asked about Amazon on the call, and responded by suggesting that the companies don’t really compete, emphasizing that Amazon is conflicted because it will always prioritize its own properties.
“A scaled independent DSP like The Trade Desk becomes essential as we help advertisers buy across everything and that we have to do that without conflict or compromise,” CEO Jeff Green said on the call. “It is my understanding that Amazon nearly doubled the supply of Prime Video inventory in the recent months. That creates a number of conflicts.”
For the second quarter, The Trade Desk reported a 19% increase in year-over-year revenue to $694 million, topping the $685 million estimate, according to analysts polled by LSEG. Adjusted earnings per share of 41 cents beat estimates by a penny.
Looking to the third quarter, the Trump administration’s tariffs were also a theme, as the company forecast revenue of at least $717 million, representing growth of 14% at minimum.
“From a macro standpoint, some of the world’s largest brands are absolutely facing pressure and some amount of uncertainty,” Green said. “Some have to respond more than others to tariffs. Many are managing inflation worries and the related pricing that comes with that.”
With Friday’s slump, The Trade Desk shares are now down 53% for the year, while the S&P 500 is up about 9%. The Trade Desk was added to the S&P 500 in June.