Billionaire Mark Cuban believes artificially intelligent (AI) chatbots like Open AI's ChatGPT are still in the beginning stages of development. But the potential impact of this new technology is "beyond anything I've ever seen," he tells CNBC Make It.
On Monday, Cuban compared ChatGPT's debut to the introduction of HTML in the early days of the Internet in a tweet.
"Everyone knew it would be impactful, but we made it seem far more complicated that it was," Cuban said of HTML.
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For context, HTML (short for hypertext markup language) can be thought of as the building blocks of the internet. It's the basic coding language used to build websites and determine how they appear to users. HTML was created by British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee in the 1980s and is still used today, along with other coding languages.
When the internet began gaining popularity in the 90s, "any kid that learned html and built websites for businesses was considered a tech genius," Cuban tweeted.
Now, there are plenty of websites that will teach you how to code using HTML, and it's considered a key entryway into the world of coding, reports the University of California, Berkeley.
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The AI adoption cycle
ChatGPT amassed 100 million monthly active users just two months into its launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to UBS.
The growing popularity of generative AI tools has companies buzzing about how to utilize the new technology too.
As more people become familiar with AI chatbots, Cuban believes "It will go from being perceived as difficult, to being recognized as being fundamental and used by everyone," he tweeted.
What's missing from the AI conversation
However, Cuban believes there's something being overlooked in the current conversations about AI's development. As more companies either invest in large langue models (LLM) like ChatGPT or create their own, they'll need to distinguish themselves from one another, he tells CNBC Make It.
"They aren't all going to give the same answers. They all aren't going to have the same expertise. And they won't have the same value to different types of users," he says.
Companies will also need to decide how much money they're willing to spend to acquire the data and intellectual property (IP) that AI chatbots learn from to formulate responses.
"The owners of the most impactful IP are not going to make it available for free to everyone and possibly not to anyone. They are going to want to get paid," Cuban says.
"Given that LLMs are supposed to be literate on almost every topic and be able to respond to almost any type of search, it's going to be financially impossible to cover every base."
Although this is a hypothetical situation, it could slow down AI's progress as it applies to LLMs going forward, Cuban says.
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