1,000 Days of ChatGPT: How AI Revolutionized Silicon Valley, Jobs, and the Global Tech Race

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI discreetly launched a “research preview,” which was their way of saying that they were still working on it and it was not yet ready. No noise was made, no big product launch—just an experiment that was initially quite small. Some of the personnel involved were anxious and thought that it was not ready. But at the same time, Sam Altman decided that “Language interfaces are going to be a big deal.” He might have been humble, but history would prove his words right. The product was named ChatGPT, and within five days, 1 million people had signed up. The current number? 800 million active users every week.

What is actually the case is that ChatGPT was successful—not in its success but what happened after. The technology had been there for a long time—Netflix recommendations, Siri, and self-driving cars—but no one was really aware of it. AI was like plumbing: it was there, but you could not see it; it was just working in the background. ChatGPT turned the light on. The scenario changed in a blink of an eye when millions of common people were given the opportunity to make AI do things like writing school assignments, composing business letters, or even poetry. The core technology was the same, but the whole experience was like a fairy-tale.

Sundar Pichai, who is the CEO of Google, considered AI as “the most profound technology that mankind is working on—not more than fire or electricity.” People through ChatGPT felt that. AI was not limited anymore to the role of an analyst; it was a full-fledged creator, producer, assistant, and even a reality shaper.

The AI Arms Race Heats Up

The big tech was not idle. Google hurriedly released Bard (which later on became Gemini). Anthropic presented Claude. Meta has brought AI into WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. Microsoft attached ChatGPT to all its products. Apple worked with OpenAI as a partner. Each and every one wanted their share of the market.

The early days of 2025 saw OpenAI as the king of the hill—but soon competition from the other side came fast. Chinese DeepSeek stunned the Silicon Valley by spending less than $6 million to scale up OpenAI’s models, which was a strong signal that billions of dollars might not be needed to produce advanced AI after all. Later that year, Google Gemini 3 defeated OpenAI’s GPT-5, which faltered at basic tasks such as algebra and geography, and it seemed like a technical upset, and the chances of OpenAI leading the market dropped from 75% to 14% almost overnight.

At the same time, Nvidia was firmly establishing itself as the artificial intelligence (AI) industry’s mainstay. It is the provider of graphic processing units (GPUs) to almost all AI models, and the stock price of the company has been on the rise. OpenAI’s data center investments amounting to $100 billion, where Nvidia chips are used, are entirely in accordance with the company’s vision for the future. Other global players such as Microsoft, xAI, Oracle, and CoreWeave have entered the race to spend big money due to the immense potential of AI technology. Training AI models at gigawatt levels of computing power and with thousands of GPUs is only an investment that few can even fathom.

The issue of “Jobs, Skills and Shift of the AI Workforce” has continued to be a hot topic since the launch of ChatGPT. The first day that ChatGPT was made public, it raised concerns about job losses. By 2025, over 100,000 tech employees have been laid off. Big companies are replacing staff with AI: Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot accounts for 30% of the code written, IBM’s AskHR has already replaced 8,000 HR staff, and Meta and Amazon have also laid off thousands. Even Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, acknowledged that jobs would go, likening it to tractors and automobiles, and he also predicted shorter workweeks and higher productivity as a result of it.

AI is indeed killing certain roles, but at the same time, it is also creating new ones like prompt engineers, AI ethics officers, human-AI collaboration specialists, etc. By 2030, about 70% of skills required for jobs are anticipated to change. In the race to provide the right regulations, governments are struggling—Europe’s AI Act was initiated in 2024, the U. S. follows the fragmented approach of federal and state rules, and China takes a government-aligned approach.

Bubble or Boom?

Investments in the sector are outrageous. Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft, Oracle are all investing billions in AI infrastructure. There are some experts who predict a bubble, and they compare the current AI hype to the one that existed during the dot-com boom. But the very