Degrees of Change

Introduction

—Juan M. Lavista Ferres, Microsoft

There are only a few moments in my life when I have felt—instantly and unmistakably—that a new technology had changed the world forever.

The first came when my parents bought me my first computer, a TK90X. It was a Brazilian clone of the Sinclair Spectrum, with 48 kilobytes of memory, plugged into a television set and running only as a BASIC programming language terminal. That small machine was my first interaction with computing. It was the device on which I learned to code. For me, it opened not just a door to technology, but a medium for creativity.

The second moment arrived about a decade later, in 1994, when I first experienced the Internet. Sitting at a 14.4 kbps modem, plugged into the house telephone line, I began browsing websites and sending emails. I spent countless hours exploring that digital world, with nearly infinite knowledge at my fingertips—my excitement about this new frontier far outweighing the frustration of a slow connection.

The most recent pivotal moment came in November 2022, when I interacted with ChatGPT for the first time. Having worked with AI and machine learning for over two decades—including earlier versions of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-2 and GPT-3—I thought I understood the trajectory of the field. Yet the arrival of GPT-3.5, and perhaps more importantly, its conversational interface, ChatGPT, surprised me in a way no technology had since the World Wide Web. For the first time, ...