Big Tech’s experimental AI can’t beat old-school productivity gems

OpenAI’s and Google’s newest AI tools are pretty clever, but tiny companies with long track records still build more indispensable products—with or without AI.

The “Chat” in ChatGPT’s name neatly encapsulates a major element of why OpenAI’s AI-infused assistant has had such epoch-shifting impact. We’ve been using PCs and phones to chat with humans for years—at least since the era of AOL Instant Messenger. Talking to a piece of software, using a largely similar interface, is not that vast a mental leap.