An Introduction to Chat and Generative AI

In 1999, Santa Monica-based company LAUNCH Media Inc. released one of the first of its kind: a new Internet music streaming service. In 2001, LAUNCH Media was purchased by Yahoo! for 12 million dollars to integrate its services and create a wider reaching streaming service, LaunchCast. When it was released, users could listen to a song, rate it on a 1–10 scale, and the service would pick more songs to play. Users could skip a song or rate it, and that choice would be stored with that song to form a complex algorithm that would allow the app to choose the next song for a listener based on similar tastes of other listeners. I used it daily while I worked. It enabled me to be exposed to a whole new library of songs I would never have been exposed to otherwise, and this was an all-day, everyday listening experience for me. As far as I was concerned, this app was a Big Deal.