The AI Breakdown First Five - Thursday November 30, 2023

Happy Birthday, ChatGPT

Exactly one year ago today, ChatGPT launched to..frankly, not much fanfare. Initially, the team didn’t think it was going to be all that big a deal. However, that quickly changed.

As we now know, ChatGPT would set the world on fire, ushering in the Generative AI era and igniting a technology race which is shaping our world in dramatic ways.

Here are a few of the key events of ChatGPT’s last year.

• November 30, 2022 - Launched

• December 5, 2022 - Hits 1 million users

• February 1, 2023 - ChatGPT becomes fastest app ever to reach 100 million users, achieving the milestone in 6 weeks (compared to TikTok’s previous record 9 months)

• March 1, 2023 - ChatGPT API released

• March 13, 2023 - GPT-4 released, which to this day remains the SOTA in LLMs

• March 23, 2023 - Plugins announced

• April 2023 - A limited audience gets to play with (and be blown away by) Code Interpreter (which would later be renamed Advanced Data Analysis)

• May 16, 2023 - Sam Altman is a witness at first Senate AI hearing post-ChatGPT

• May 18, 2023 - ChatGPT mobile first launched

• Late-May to Mid-June - Sam Altman goes on a global listening tour, meeting with everyone from developers to heads of state

• June 2023 - June becomes ChatGPT’s first ever month of decreased usage, sparking (obviously incorrect) calls that the AI bubble had burst

• July 5, 2023 - OpenAI announces Superalignment team, led by Ilya Sutskever, with a goal to solve the core technical challenges of alignment with superintelligence in 4 years

• July 20, 2023 - An underrated development in Custom Instructions, which would be the first glimmers of what would come with custom GPTs.

• July 26, 2023 - OpenAI helps launched Frontier Model Forum as a self-regulatory body with Anthropic, Google and Microsoft.

• August 28, 2023 - ChatGPT Enterprise launched as an attempt to address privacy, security and data concerns for business customers

• August 29, 2023 - OpenAI hits $1B revenue run rate

• September 6, 2023 - OpenAI announces first developer conference for November, igniting wave of rumors and speculation about what was to come

• September 25, 2023 - ChatGPT goes multimodal with launch of ChatGPT Vision

• October 19, 2023 - Image generation model DALL-E 3 becomes available directly from within ChatGPT

• November 6, 2023 - Among a slew of pricing updates and other announcements, OpenAI Dev Day sees the company launch custom GPTs, their first steps towards AI agents

• November 17, 2023 - OpenAI board shocks the world when they FIRE Sam Altman, saying they’ve lost trust in him but providing no additional information

• November 22, 2023 - After a grueling five days of negotiations, rumors, and not one but two interim CEOs, Sam Altman is reinstated as CEO of OpenAI.

Of course, around all of this, an entire industry roared into prominence, reshaping how people think about work, school, and the world around them.

As we head into ChatGPT’s second year - a new set of challenges aways.

• How can Sam restore confidence that has been challenged by the dramatic actions of the last few weeks?

• What will it mean for the company if and when models meet GPT-4 capacity?

• How will policy and new regulations impact the way the field develops?

• What of the major questions of safety and alignment?

Still, hard to imagine a more impactful first year for a company — maybe ever. Happy Birthday ChatGPT!

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