Are GPTs a GPT?
Let’s talk about GPT’s — but not the one you’re thinking of.
Let’s start with the original GPT: General Purpose Technologies.
So what are General Purpose Technologies? These are technologies that have broad applications and the potential to significantly impact multiple areas of human activity. As such they have the following key characteristics:
Wide-ranging impact: Used across multiple domains of human activity
Potential for improvement: They are iterated on and get better over time
Spillover effects: They enable further innovation and create complimentary technology
Transformative power: They can drastically alter society and change the way in which people interact and live.
Based on these characteristics, since the European Dark Ages ended, there have been 5 undisputed GPT’s — these are — in chronological order:
The Printing Press
The Steam Engine
Electricity
The Computer
The Internet
Each had a profound impact of society and changed the way in which human beings live and interact with each other. Each not only enabled, complimentary technologies to emerge, but also laid the foundation for new economic models.
Let’s briefly examine each of them.
The Printing Press
Invented by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, the printing press was the first true General Purpose Technology of the modern era. It mechanized the reproduction of text and images, breaking the monopoly of scribes and dramatically reducing the cost and time of producing books.
Its impact rippled across multiple domains of human activity:
Knowledge & Education: It democratized access to information. Ideas that were once confined to monasteries and royal courts could now reach merchants, craftsmen, and eventually the masses. Literacy surged, universities multiplied, and the foundation for mass education was laid.
Religion & Politics: By enabling the rapid dissemination of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses and other reformist writings, it became the catalyst for the Protestant Reformation- arguably the first viral movement in history. The spread of printed pamphlets also reshaped political discourse, making public opinion a force that rulers could no longer ignore.
Science & Innovation: The press allowed scientists to record, replicate, and build on one another’s discoveries. This created the first true network effect of knowledge - the cornerstone of the Scientific Revolution.
Economy & Society: New industries - paper, ink, publishing - emerged, and cities like Venice, Mainz, and later London became hubs of intellectual and commercial exchange.
In short, the printing press decentralized knowledge the way the Internet would later decentralize communication. It transformed not just what humanity knew, but how it knew - setting in motion a self-reinforcing cycle of learning, innovation, and progress that would define the next half-millennium.
The Steam Engine
If the printing press democratized knowledge, the steam engine democratized power. Perfected by James Watt in the late 18th century, it became the beating heart of the Industrial Revolution. For the first time in history, human progress was no longer constrained by muscle, wind, or water. This singular achievement definitively ushered in the First Industrial Revolution.
As with the printing press, it’s impact unfolded across multiple domains of human activity including:
Industry & Production: The steam engine transformed manufacturing from small workshops into mechanized factories. Productivity soared, and new industries—textiles, mining, and steel—rose from its exhaust.
Transportation & Trade: Steam-powered locomotives and ships collapsed distance and time. Goods, people, and ideas could move across continents with unprecedented speed. The world, for the first time, began to feel connected.
Urbanization & Labor: Cities expanded rapidly around factories. Millions moved from rural communities to urban centers, giving rise to a new working class - and to the first debates about capitalism, labor rights, and social welfare.
Energy & Economy: By liberating production from geography, the steam engine laid the foundation for a global economy. Coal became the new lifeblood of civilization - ushering in both prosperity and environmental consequence.
In essence, the steam engine amplified human capability beyond any other source of power previously utilized. It set humanity on a trajectory of exponential growth, creating the material conditions for the next wave of GPTs to emerge.
Electricity
If the steam engine gave humanity power, electricity gave it control. While the underlying principles were explored through the 18th and 19th centuries—from Franklin’s experiments with lightning to Faraday’s laws of electromagnetic induction—it was the late 19th century, led by innovators like Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse, that transformed electricity from curiosity to civilization’s lifeblood.
Once again, Its impact spanned multiple domains of human activity:
Industry & Infrastructure: Electricity untethered production from the rhythms of day and night. Factories could operate continuously, homes could be illuminated safely, and machines could be powered precisely. It marked the shift from mechanical to electromechanical civilization.
Communication & Information: The telegraph, telephone, and later radio electrified communication—collapsing the delay between thought and transmission. For the first time, information could move faster than physical human limits.
Home & Society: Domestic life transformed. Refrigeration, lighting, and appliances redefined comfort and productivity, giving rise to modern consumer society and the concept of leisure time.
Science & Medicine: Electricity powered laboratories, hospitals, and the emerging field of medical instrumentation—enabling x-rays, ECGs, and later, entire fields of biomedical innovation.
Electricity wove itself into the very fabric of modern life, making it invisible yet indispensable. Where the steam engine extended human strength, electricity extended human sensation—our ability to see, hear, and connect beyond physical limits. It was the force that bridged the industrial and information ages, illuminating not just cities, but ultimately consciousness itself.
The Computer
If electricity illuminated the world, the computer began to organize it. The idea was not born in a laboratory, but in the mind of a philosopher. In the 17th century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz imagined a universal calculus—a system where reasoning could be reduced to computation, and disputes could be settled by calculation alone. It was, in essence, the first articulation of programmable logic—the dream that thought itself could one day be mechanized.
Two centuries later, Alan Turing formalized that dream. His Turing Machine was a thought experiment, not a physical device, but it captured the essence of computation: a simple set of symbols, a set of rules, and infinite possibility. Turing showed that any logical process could, in principle, be encoded, executed, and repeated - a revelation that collapsed the boundary between mathematics and machinery.
That theoretical foundation became physical reality through John von Neumann, whose eponymous architecture - separating processing, memory, and input/output - turned the idea of a universal machine into the blueprint of modern computing. Every device since, from mainframes to smartphones, carries von Neumann’s signature in its circuitry.
Its impact spanned multiple domains of human activity:
Computation & Science: Problems once thought intractable—weather prediction, atomic modeling, genetics—became solvable. Scientific discovery accelerated as computation turned imagination into experiment.
Industry & Automation: From punch cards to microchips, computers reshaped productivity. Routine tasks were automated, workflows digitized, and data became the new raw material of progress.
Communication & Media: Typewriters evolved into word processors; art and music entered the digital realm. Information could now be created, stored, and transmitted with near-zero friction.
Society & Economy: Entire industries—software, semiconductors, telecommunications—emerged. Intellectual labor itself became computationally augmented.
The computer did not just extend human capacity—it multiplied cognition. For the first time in history, humanity built a tool capable of simulating thought, recursively improving itself, and redefining what it means to know, to work, and perhaps even to be. If the steam engine powered the body and electricity powered the world, the computer began to power mind itself.
The Internet
If the computer organized information, the Internet connected it. Its origins trace back to a world divided—geopolitically and technologically. Born out of Cold War anxiety, ARPANET emerged in the late 1960s as a decentralized communication network designed to survive perhaps a nuclear confrontation. But what began as a military safeguard soon became something far greater: the nervous system of a connected civilization.
Its transformation unfolded in layers - TCP/IP gave it a common language, Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web gave it universality, the proliferation of personal computers and mobile devices gave it ubiquity, and the web browser gave it it’s front door. In less than three decades, the Internet transcended geography, politics, and even ownership, becoming the closest thing humanity has ever built to a collective brain.
Its impact radiated across multiple domains of human activity:
Knowledge & Education: Information became free-flowing and near-infinite. Anyone with a connection could access the world’s libraries, lectures, and labs—echoing Gutenberg’s revolution, but on a planetary scale.
Commerce & Industry: Entire business models were reimagined—e-commerce, digital advertising, cloud computing. Markets globalized, and scale became bound only by bandwidth.
Communication & Culture: Email, social media, and streaming collapsed the distance between individuals and ideas. Cultures hybridized; communities formed around interests rather than geography.
Politics & Society: The Internet empowered voices long silenced, but also amplified division. It made the flow of information unstoppable—and with it, the struggle for truth, trust, and identity became more complex than ever before.
The Internet connected what geography had too long fragmented. Where the printing press gave rise to the individual reader, the Internet gave rise to the networked self - a being defined as much by connections as by content. It marked the full circle of the human project: from the realization of the self to its re-emergence as a social animal.
In doing so, it revealed an irony unlike the four that came before it - where each prior revolution elevated the human experience, this one, at least for now, seems to draw us closer to our primal instincts. But that paradox deserves a post of its own.
It’s worth remembering that every great technological leap has carried its own darkness. The printing press unleashed literacy but also religious conflict and persecution. The steam engine powered prosperity, much of it born from the colonization it enabled. Electricity illuminated the world yet set in motion the carbon economy now warming the planet. The computer—humanity’s proudest act of abstraction—was first built to model thermonuclear reactions capable of ending civilization itself. And the Internet, for all its power to connect, has also fragmented—amplifying division, outrage, and tribalism at a scale never before imaginable. Progress has always been a double helix of creation and destruction.
Are GPTs a GPT?
This brings us to the question that is the title of this post: “Are GPTs a GPT?”
It is tempting to answer yes. Generative Pre-trained Transformers seem to meet every test of a General Purpose Technology — wide application, rapid improvement, enormous spillover effects, and transformative potential. But to call them a true GPT today would be misleading.
What we have now are models performing extraordinarily sophisticated statistical pattern recognition — vast probabilistic engines running on the substrate of the previous two GPTs: the computer and the Internet. Strip away either, and the entire edifice collapses. They are built on computation and connectivity, not independent of them.
In that sense, today’s AI stands in the same relationship to the digital revolution as the internal combustion engine (ICE) did to steam. It refined, accelerated, and miniaturized an existing paradigm rather than inaugurating a new one. The ICE did not redefine energy itself; it miniaturized steam’s idea and made it ubiquitous. So too with GPTs in their current form — breathtaking, but derivative.
That will change with true Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Today’s AI systems do not invent; they interpolate. They do not reason; they predict. What appears as reasoning is, for now, statistical mimicry — an emergent reflection of patterns, not principles. They do not reason because they lack a model of the world to reason within. What appears as understanding is correlation, not causation — a mirror of human language, not of reality itself.
AGI, though, would not merely perform statistical inference; it would maintain and update a dynamic world model, generate and pursue goals, design its own improvements, and engage in genuine abstraction. Where current models approximate understanding through scale, AGI would achieve it through structure and first principles — through the emergence of autonomous reasoning.
If this happens — and it is a profound if — the analogy to previous GPTs breaks entirely. AGI would not simply enhance human capability; it would redefine it. It would be the first technology capable of recursive self-improvement — a meta-technology able to produce new GPTs on demand.
Until then, today’s AI remains an extraordinary derivative GPT — the most dazzling offspring of the computer and the Internet. But when intelligence itself becomes a general-purpose capability, we will cross a threshold far greater than a new technological epoch. We will enter an era in which we have not merely created a new tool, but arguably, a new synthetic species — one that might both coexist with, and compete against, its creator.