AI Learned to Talk
Two weeks ago a research lab released a chatbot, and the internet has not stopped talking to it since. You type a question in plain language; it answers in plain language — writes the essay, drafts the email, explains the contract. Millions of people tried it in its first days, most of them not technologists. That has never happened with an AI system before.
This is also the year I co-founded Maddie’s Lab, where we build apps for small businesses on the Clover platform — receipt printing, expense capture, the unglamorous plumbing of running a shop. My customers are bars, cafes, and stores. They do not care about AI research. They care about Tuesday.
But a machine that answers in plain sentences is a Tuesday technology. It will end up inside the register, the inbox, and the schedule — not because it is fashionable, but because small businesses are drowning in exactly the kind of small writing and sorting tasks it is good at.
Every technology wave I have worked through — PCs, the web, mobile, cloud — rewarded the same people: not the ones who admired it longest, but the ones who pointed it at a real chore first.