ChatGPT could turn out to be hero for humanity or just a 'horrible product'. Here's what Elon Musk, Bill Gates and 10 heavyweights have to say on the red-hot AI.

• Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Paul Krugman have all weighed in on the hottest topic this year – ChatGPT.
• OpenAI's CEO himself called the chatbot a "horrible" product, while Kevin O'Leary thinks the tool is a threat to Google.

ChatGPT has stolen the show this year, garnering a pool of lovers and haters among some of the world's most influential people.

From prominent names such as Elon Musk and Bill Gates to Wall Street banks like Morgan Stanley, everyone's got something to say.

The artificial-intelligence tool, developed by OpenAI, recently shot to fame after bagging a $10 billion investment from Microsoft. It's also showcased impressive skills from writing layoff emails and dating-app messages to offering Warren Buffett-style investing advice, in just a matter of seconds.

Optimists like Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak thinks ChatGPT is "pretty impressive" while others including billionaire investor Mark Cuban have flagged problems with the chatbot, including it's tendency to spew out misinformation.

Here's what 12 top investors, academics and banks have to say about the human mimic-like tool.

Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX CEO

"OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it "Open" AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all," Musk said.

The billionaire tech guru cofounded OpenAI – the company behind ChatGPT. He said the bot "has illustrated to people just how advanced AI has become."

"The AI has been advanced for a while. It just didn't have a user interface that was accessible to most people," he added. "It's both positive or negative and has great, great promise, great capability," Musk further said of AI, adding that "with that comes great danger."

Bill Gates, Microsoft cofounder

"Until now, artificial intelligence could read and write, but could not understand the content. The new programs like ChatGPT will make many office jobs more efficient by helping to write invoices or letters. This will change our world," the billionaire said in an interview.

Gates added that ChatGPT has some "exciting" use cases for humans including being a "math tutor" for students, offering "medical advice" to people who can't access a doctor. "This is every bit as important as the PC, as the internet," he said of AI chatbots.

Paul Krugman, veteran economist

"ChatGPT is only the latest example of technology that seems to be able to carry out tasks that not long ago seemed to require the services not just of human beings but of humans with substantial formal education," Krugman said in a New York Times op-ed.

Larry Summers, former US Treasury Secretary

"In its current incarnation it's certainly not completely reliable and skilled people can get it to behave in quite bizarre ways," Summers said of ChatGPT.

"But you know, the first rockets often didn't get off the launch pad, the first jet planes were crash-worthy, the early internet was pretty wild with pornography. And so, technology in their early stages always have a lot of problem and flaws," he said.

"My guess is within 10 years, all of us are going to be relying in some important way, on some descendent of ChatGPT," Summers added.

Mark Cuban, billionaire investor

Speaking on comedian Jon Stewart's podcast, "The Problem with Jon Stewart," Cuban said online misinformation "is only going to get worse" as AI tools like ChatGPT evolve.

"Once these things start taking on a life of their own ... it will be difficult for us to define why and how the machine makes the decisions it makes, and who controls the machine," Cuban said. "Our generation, Gen X and older, doesn't get it," he said of people who may not always fact-check information from the internet.

"Gen Z and younger, they're not only native to it, they know how to block things out ... They're more in tune to all these issues," he added.

Kevin O'Leary, Shark Tank investor

"ChatGPT certainly is a threat to Google, and Google must know that," he said. "The market hasn't really punished Google stock for this. But a few quarters from now, if ChatGPT really starts to bring in significant subscriber fees, then we'll see what happens," O'Leary told Insider's Phil Rosen.

"[AI is] sort of the new, hot kid on the block, like the internet was 20 years ago," O'Leary continued. "This is the next thing, and what you learn with next things is that it's often best to invest in the first mover and sit back and watch."

Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO

"I think it's exciting, what's possible with generative AI," Jassy said about generative AI and ChatGPT.

"And it's part of what you're seeing with models like ChatGPT. But most large, deeply technical companies like ours, have been working on these very large, generative AI models themselves for a long time," he added.

Steve Wozniak, Apple cofounder

"I was very negative at first on any human-made technology equivalent to nature," Wozniak said. "But ChatGPT is so impressive," he added.

"I think it's going to be useful to humans as all computer technology. AI is the high-end of it where it follows procedures to learn things [...] the trouble is it does good things for us, but it can make horrible mistakes by not knowing what humanness is," Wozniak warned.

Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO

During a podcast interview, Altman highlighted problems with his company's chatbot. He's even called it a "horrible product."

"People are really just going to a site that sometimes works and sometimes is down," he said. "They're typing in something, they're trying until they get it right, and then they're copying that answer and going to paste it in somewhere else — and then going back and trying to integrate that with search results or their other workflows," he added.

But ChatGPT is "cool, for sure," he's previously said. "People really love it, which makes us very happy. But no one would say this was like a great, well-integrated product yet... but there is so much value here that people are willing to put up with it," Altman said.

Mira Murati, OpenAI chief technology officer

"I think that we can see that it has the potential to really revolutionize the way we learn. People are in classrooms of, say, 30 people. Everyone has different backgrounds, ways of learning, and everyone is getting basically the same curriculum. With tools like ChatGPT, you can endlessly converse with a model to understand a concept in a way that is catered to your level of understanding. It has immense potential to help us with personalized education," Murati said during a Q&A.

Matthew Bartolini, State Street strategist

"The first time I saw it, we were playing around with it — 'write us a blog post about the benefits of ETFs ChatGPT would only be a 'B-minus student' of markets, State Street strategist who uses AI to pick stocks says,' and it got it probably 80% correct in how we would want to structure the argument," he told Bloomberg's "What Goes Up" podcast.

"And that's where ChatGPT is, that it kind of gives you about an 80%," Bartolini added. "I was joking with some of my colleagues who have older kids that ChatGPT would probably be a B-minus student if it only ever turned in its homework because that's the surface level it gets," he added.

Morgan Stanley

According to the US bank, ChatGPT will keep "hallucinating" wrong answers for a couple of years.

"When we talk of high-accuracy task, it is worth mentioning that ChatGPT sometimes hallucinates and can generate answers that are seemingly convincing, but are actually wrong," Morgan Stanley analysts led by Shawn Kim wrote.

"At this stage, the best practice is for highly educated users to spot the mistakes and use Generative AI applications as an augmentation to existing labor rather than substitution," they added.