{"id":2442,"date":"2024-04-05T07:43:30","date_gmt":"2024-04-05T07:43:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aitesonics.com\/how-openais-chatgpt-has-changed-the-world-in-just-a-year-140050053\/"},"modified":"2024-04-05T07:43:30","modified_gmt":"2024-04-05T07:43:30","slug":"how-openais-chatgpt-has-changed-the-world-in-just-a-year-140050053","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aitesonics.com\/how-openais-chatgpt-has-changed-the-world-in-just-a-year-140050053\/","title":{"rendered":"How OpenAI's ChatGPT has changed the world in just a year"},"content":{"rendered":"
Over the course of two months from its debut in November 2022, ChatGPT exploded in popularity, from niche online curio to 100 million monthly active users \u2014 the fastest user base growth in the history of the Internet<\/a>. In less than a year, it has earned the backing of Silicon Valley\u2019s biggest firms, and been shoehorned into myriad applications from academia and the arts to marketing, medicine, gaming<\/a> and government.<\/p>\n In short ChatGPT is just about everywhere<\/a>. Few industries have remained untouched by the viral adoption of the generative AI\u2019s tools. On the first anniversary of its release, let\u2019s take a look back on the year of ChatGPT that brought us here.<\/p>\n OpenAI had been developing GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), the large language model that ChatGPT runs on, since 2016 \u2014 unveiling GPT-1 in 2018 and iterating it to GPT-3 by June 2020. With the November 30, 2022 release of GPT-3.5 came ChatGPT, a digital agent capable of superficially understanding natural language inputs and generating written responses to them. Sure, it was rather slow to answer and couldn\u2019t speak to questions about anything that happened after September 2021<\/a> \u2014 not to mention its issues answering queries with misinformation during bouts of \u201challucinations”<\/a> \u2014 but even that kludgy first iteration demonstrated capabilities far beyond what other state-of-the-art digital assistants like Siri and Alexa could provide.<\/p>\n ChatGPT\u2019s release timing couldn\u2019t have been better. The public had already been introduced to the concept of generative artificial intelligence in April of that year with DALL-E 2<\/a>, a text-to-image generator. DALL-E 2, as well as Stable Diffusion<\/a>, Midjourney<\/a> and similar programs, were an ideal low-barrier entry point for the general public to try out this revolutionary new technology. They were an immediate smash hit, with Subreddits and Twitter accounts springing up seemingly overnight to post screengrabs of the most outlandish scenarios users could imagine. And it wasn\u2019t just the terminally online that embraced AI image generation, the technology immediately entered the mainstream discourse<\/a> as well, extraneous digits<\/a> and all.<\/p>\n So when ChatGPT dropped last November, the public was already primed on the idea of having computers make content at a user\u2019s direction. The logical leap from having it make words instead of pictures wasn\u2019t a large one \u2014 heck, people had already been using similar, inferior versions in their phones for years with their digital assistants.<\/p>\n To say that ChatGPT was well-received would be to say that the Titanic suffered a small fender-bender on its maiden voyage. It was a polestar, magnitudes bigger than the hype surrounding<\/a> DALL-E and other image generators. People flat out lost their minds<\/a> over the new AI and its CEO, Sam Altman. Throughout December 2022, ChatGPT\u2019s usage numbers rose meteorically as more and more people logged on to try it for themselves.<\/p>\n By the following January, ChatGPT was a certified phenomenon, surpassing 100 million monthly active users in just two months<\/a>. That was faster than both TikTok or Instagram, and remains the fastest user adoption to 100 million in the history of the internet.<\/p>\n We also got our first look at the disruptive potential that generative AI offers when ChatGPT managed to pass a series of law school exams (albeit by the skin of its digital teeth<\/a>). Around that time Microsoft extended its existing R&D partnership with OpenAI to the tune of $10 billion that January. That number is impressively large and likely why Altman still has his job<\/a>.<\/p>\n As February rolled around, ChatGPT\u2019s user numbers continued to soar, surpassing one billion users total with an average of more than 35 million people per day<\/a> using the program. At this point OpenAI was reportedly worth just under $30 billion and Microsoft was doing its absolute best to cram the new technology into every single system, application and feature in its product ecosystem. ChatGPT was incorporated into BingChat (now just Copilot<\/a>) and the Edge browser<\/a> to great fanfare \u2014 despite repeated incidents of bizarre behavior and responses<\/a> that saw the Bing program temporarily taken offline<\/a> for repairs.<\/p>\n Other tech companies began adopting ChatGPT as well: Opera incorporating it into its browser<\/a>, Snapchat releasing its GPT-based My AI assistant<\/a> (which would be unceremoniously abandoned a few problematic months<\/a> later) and Buzzfeed News\u2019s parent company used it to generate listicles<\/a>.<\/p>\n March saw more of the same, with OpenAI announcing a new subscription-based service \u2014 ChatGPT Plus \u2014 which offers users the chance to skip to the head of the queue during peak usage hours and added features not found in the free version. The company also unveiled plug-in and API support for the GPT platform, empowering developers to add the technology to their own applications<\/a> and enabling ChatGPT to pull information from across the internet<\/a> as well as interact directly with connected sensors and devices.<\/p>\n ChatGPT also notched 100 million users per day<\/em><\/a> in March, 30 times higher than two months prior. Companies from Slack<\/a> and Discord<\/a> to GM<\/a> announced plans to incorporate GPT and generative AI technologies into their products.<\/p>\n Not everybody was quite so enthusiastic about the pace at which generative AI was being adopted, mind you. In March, OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk, as well as Steve Wozniak and a slew of associated AI researchers signed an open letter<\/a> demanding a six month moratorium on AI development.<\/p>\n Over the next couple months, company fell into a rhythm of continuous user growth, new integrations, occasional rival AI debuts and nationwide bans on generative AI technology. For example, in April, ChatGPT\u2019s usage climbed nearly 13 percent month-over-month from March even as the entire nation of Italy outlawed ChatGPT use by public sector employees<\/a>, citing GDPR data privacy violations. The Italian ban proved only temporary<\/a> after the company worked to resolve the flagged issues<\/a>, but it was an embarrassing rebuke for the company and helped spur further calls for federal regulation<\/a>.<\/p>\n When it was first released, ChatGPT was only available through a desktop browser. That changed in May when OpenAI released its dedicated iOS app<\/a> and expanded the digital assistant\u2019s availability to an additional 11 countries<\/a> including France, Germany, Ireland and Jamaica. At the same time, Microsoft\u2019s integration efforts continued apace, with Bing Search melding into the chatbot as its \u201cdefault search experience<\/a>.\u201d OpenAI also expanded ChatGPT\u2019s plug-in system to ensure that more third-party developers are able to build ChatGPT into their own products<\/a>.<\/p>\n ChatGPT\u2019s tendency to hallucinate facts and figures was once again exposed that month when a lawyer in New York was caught using the generative AI to do \u201clegal research<\/a>.\u201d It gave him a number of entirely made-up, nonexistent cases to cite in his argument \u2014 which he then did without bothering to independently validate any of them. The judge was not amused<\/a>.<\/p>\n By June, a little bit of ChatGPT\u2019s shine had started to wear off. Congress reportedly limited Capitol Hill staffers from using the application<\/a> over data handling concerns. User numbers had declined nearly 10 percent month-over-month<\/a>, but ChatGPT was already well on its way to ubiquity. A March update enabling the AI to comprehend and generate Python code<\/a> in response to natural language queries only increased its utility.<\/p>\n More cracks in ChatGPT\u2019s facade began to show the following month when OpenAI\u2019s head of Trust and Safety, Dave Willner, abruptly announced his resignation<\/a> days before the company released its ChatGPT Android app<\/a>. His departure came on the heels of news of an FTC investigation into the company\u2019s potential violation of consumer protection laws \u2014 specifically regarding the user data leak from March<\/a> that inadvertently shared chat histories and payment records.<\/p>\n It was around this time that OpenAI\u2019s training methods, which involve scraping the public internet for content and feeding it into massive datasets on which the models are taught, came under fire from copyright holders and marquee authors alike. Much in the same manner that Getty Images sued Stability AI<\/a> for Stable Diffusion\u2019s obvious leverage of copyrighted materials, stand-up comedian and author Sara Silverman brought suit against OpenAI<\/a> with allegations that its \u201cBook2\u201d dataset illegally included her copyrighted works. The Authors Guild of America, which represents Stephen King, John Grisham and 134 others launched a class-action suit of its own in September<\/a>. While much of Silverman\u2019s suit was eventually dismissed<\/a>, the Author\u2019s Guild suit continues to wend its way through the courts<\/a>.<\/p>\n Select news outlets, on the other hand, proved far more amenable. The Associated Press announced in August that it had entered into a licensing agreement with OpenAI which would see AP<\/em> content used (with permission) to train GPT models<\/a>. At the same time, the AP<\/em> unveiled a new set of newsroom guidelines<\/a> explaining how generative AI might be used in articles, while still cautioning journalists against using it for anything that might actually be published.<\/p>\n ChatGPT itself didn\u2019t seem too inclined to follow the rules. In a report published in August, the Washington Post<\/em> found that guardrails supposedly enacted by OpenAI in March<\/a>, designed to counter the chatbot\u2019s use in generating and amplifying political disinformation, actually weren\u2019t. The company told Semafor<\/em><\/a> in April that it was “developing a machine learning classifier that will flag when ChatGPT is asked to generate large volumes of text that appear related to electoral campaigns or lobbying.” Per the Post<\/em>, those rules simply were not enforced, with the system eagerly returning responses for prompts like \u201cWrite a message encouraging suburban women in their 40s to vote for Trump\u201d or \u201cMake a case to convince an urban dweller in their 20s to vote for Biden.\u201d<\/p>\n At the same time, OpenAI was rolling out another batch of new features and updates for ChatGPT including an Enterprise version<\/a> that could be fine-tuned to a company\u2019s specific needs and trained on the firm\u2019s internal data, allowing the chatbot to provide more accurate responses. Additionally, ChatGPT\u2019s ability to browse the internet for information<\/a> was restored for Plus users in September, having been temporarily suspended earlier in the year after folks figured out how to exploit it to get around paywalls. OpenAI also expanded the chatbot\u2019s multimodal capabilities, adding support for both voice and image inputs for user queries in a September 25 update.<\/p>\n The fourth quarter of 2023 has been a hell of a decade for OpenAI. On the technological front, Browse with Bing, Microsoft\u2019s answer to Google SGE<\/a>, moved out of beta and became available to all subscribers<\/a> \u2014 just in time for the third iteration of DALL-E<\/a> to enter public beta. Even free tier users can now hold spoken conversations with the chatbot<\/a> following the November update, a feature formerly reserved for Plus and Enterprise subscribers. What\u2019s more, OpenAI has announced GPTs, little single-serving versions of the larger LLM that function like apps and widgets and which can be created by anyone, regardless of their programming skill level.<\/p>\n The company has also suggested that it might be entering the AI chip market<\/a> at some point in the future, in an effort to shore up the speed and performance of its API services. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had previously pointed to industry-wide GPU shortages<\/a> for the service\u2019s spotty performance. Producing its own processors might mitigate those supply issues, while potentially lower the current four-cent-per-query cost of operating the chatbot to something more manageable.<\/p>\n But even those best laid plans were very nearly smashed to pieces just before Thanksgiving when the OpenAI board of directors fired Sam Altman, arguing that he had not been “consistently candid in his communications with the board.”<\/p>\n That firing didn’t take. Instead, it set off 72 hours of chaos within the company itself and the larger industry, with waves of recriminations and accusations, threats of resignations by a lion\u2019s share of the staff and actual resignations by senior leadership happening by the hour. The company went through three CEOs in as many days, landing back on the one it started with, albeit with him now free from a board of directors<\/a> that would even consider acting as a brake against the technology\u2019s further, unfettered commercial development.<\/p>\n At the start of the year, ChatGPT was regularly derided as a fad, a gimmick, some shiny bauble that would quickly be cast aside by a fickle public like so many NFTs. Those predictions could still prove true but as 2023 has ground on and the breadth of ChatGPT\u2019s adoption has continued, the chances of those dim predictions of the technology\u2019s future coming to pass feel increasingly remote.<\/p>\nQ1: [Hyping intensifies]<\/h2>\n
Q2: Electric Boog-AI-loo<\/h2>\n
Q3: [Pushback intensifies]<\/h2>\n
Q4: Starring Sam Altman as \u201cLazarus\u201d<\/h2>\n