OpenAI, Software’s Grim Reaper?

OpenAI can hardly announce a new product before a chorus of tech pundits declare it will kill a bunch of other applications. In the most recent example, investors in several public software companies went into a panic last week after OpenAI showed a demo of an internal artificial intelligence tool it developed to analyze contracts. 

The internal tool, DocuGPT, isn’t a standalone product that OpenAI plans to sell but rather aims to demonstrate how ChatGPT can quickly code simple applications that are useful to enterprises, the company said in a blog post. The post also showcased how OpenAI used new features in ChatGPT to automate tasks like drafting sales messages to customers and collecting customer feedback.

The mere publication of OpenAI’s blog post about DocuGPT led to a selloff in the stocks of DocuSign, HubSpot, and Salesforce last week.