I tried to create ChatGPT in 1999 – this is what failure taught meImage generated by ChatGPTFred Plais created a natural language search engine in the early days of the internet. ChatGPT (and other LLMs) did what we tried to do with a company I founded in 1999, which was killed by the dot-com crash. But with that failure came a lot of lessons – both for me, and today’s AI start-ups. ChatGPT before AII co-founded search engine, Infoclic, in 1999. A “natural language” search engine, where you could ask questions rather than focus on keywords, made sense.