SA国际传媒

For years, tech writers have been warning about how AI will eliminate the need for all kinds of human-staffed professions from truck driving to portfolio management.

Turns out, the AI bots are really coming for us.

That鈥檚 becoming increasingly clear amidst the ongoing tech world buzz around 鈥檚 newly launched writing bot. Today鈥檚 tech, it appears, is pretty capable of churning out readable, reasonably accurate prose on a dizzying range of topics.

No, ChatGPT won鈥檛 be winning the Nobel Prize for literature. But in this employed-for-now writer鈥檚 experience, it actually does a credible job discussing octopus intelligence, dishing up a brownie recipe, or explaining how to make a ham sandwich in the style of the King James Bible.

And OpenAI is just one of numerous funded companies working on tools aimed at either helping humans write or letting computers do the job. Using SA国际传媒 data, we identified a sample set of 20 companies along these lines funded in the past couple years, listed below:

After OpenAI, the most heavily funded company on our list is , the AI-powered writing assistance tool that has raised $400 million to date, including a $200 million round a year ago at a reported $13 billion valuation.

Next is , developer of a platform that helps create original content while optimizing it for ROI and even repackaging it in different ways and in different languages. The Austin-based company raised $125 million in an October round led by that vaulted it to unicorn status.

Still early days for AI

Altogether, the 20 companies on our list raised a combined $1.7 billion to date. However, of that total, just over a billion went to OpenAI, for which writing is but one of several focus areas around artificial intelligence. Even before the ChatGPT release, the company, a nonprofit with a for-profit subsidiary, was generating copious attention for its AI-generated imagery tool.

For now, we鈥檙e still early in the introduction of AI-enabled writing tools, so it鈥檚 premature to predict a sharp decline in demand for skilled human writers. That said, it鈥檚 also premature to say these tools won鈥檛 become good enough to displace us.

In the meantime, the craft of writing a few simple paragraphs around a basic topic 鈥� the staple school assignment for countless decades 鈥� has certainly gotten easier of late with the help of tech. Let鈥檚 hope over the long run that turns out to be a good thing.

Illustration: Dom Guzman