ChatGPT Turns 1 - Timeline of a Remarkable First Year and its Impact on Industry and Society
How a UI update made all the difference.
Happy Birthday, ChatGPT! It is hard to overstate how much ChatGPT changed the world’s interest in generative AI. I was using InstructGPT in the OpenAI playground to assist with search in early 2022 and had covered the GPT models as an analyst in 2020. My first article on what we now call generative AI was in 2017. In June 2022, Eric Schwartz and I decided to launch Synthedia and created a dedicated section on generative AI in Voicebot.ai because we thought the technologies were not getting enough attention.
Well, that changed on November 30, 2022. Suddenly, there was a lot of attention on the space. We had not anticipated that a fine-tuned version of GPT-3.5 with a friendly UI would so significantly improve its value to users and create such intense interest in the generative AI category.
I thought it might be useful to provide a timeline of the key ChatGPT milestones over the past year as a point of reference and offer some perspective about how and why it had such a broad impact across industry and society.
One Year of ChatGPT
Links to the key ChatGPT stories from 2022 and 2023 are included at the bottom of this post. Let us know if we missed anything.
The Importance of UI
Many AI researchers wondered what the fuss was about after ChatGPT’s launch. Many didn’t see the technology as particularly new. It was simply a popular large language model (LLM) fine-tuned for chat, after all. Wasn’t it?
What they didn’t understand was the user interface update made the capabilities more accessible and introduced many people to the broad capabilities of LLMs for the first time. Because they could test-drive the LLM capabilities, users could then extrapolate how the technology could be useful to them personally or their business processes.
A look at history suggests that technologists typically underestimate the importance of user interface (UI) innovation in driving awareness, interest, and adoption of new technologies. The Internet was already providing some value through file exchange, list servers, and email in the early 1990s. However, the Mosaic browser and later Netscape Navigator offered a new interface and platform that made it accessible and, crucially, understandable to users. Most people were also familiar with graphical user interfaces (GUI) through desktop applications, so applying that to internet destinations was an easy leap and far more engaging than the text-driven internet experiences available up to that point. The web grew quickly and accelerated the broad adoption of internet-based services, driven first by the introduction of mouse-enabled visual interfaces.
Similarly, the iPhone was not the first smartphone. However, it was the first to master the touch interface. The introduction of sharp image resolution, a camera, touch, swipe, and pinch created new value for users. Smartphone adoption subsequently exploded for Apple and others that replicated the touch-first UI.
The chat interface was already a known UI framework from person-to-person and person-to-chatbot solutions. Introducing that to a fine-tuned LLM lit the spark of rapid expansion in awareness, interest, and use. Users could immediately derive value from the solution and envision how it might solve other problems.
What Happened
ChatGPT lit a spark of enthusiasm and innovation. Enterprise buyers and CEOs were prepared for a year of restraint in technology spending. However, they quickly made an exception for LLM-enabled technologies. They were suddenly available for meetings to discuss the technology with software and cloud providers. Shortly thereafter, software companies and enterprises rushed to begin pilots.
The concept of the consumerization of IT is thought to have originated in a 2001 presentation during the Leading Edge Forum. It was based on an observation that enterprises had typically adopted technology capabilities first, and some would later appear in consumer products. However, that trend began to reverse as technologies that began with consumer adoption were later brought into enterprises. That is precisely the revolution sparked by ChatGPT.
There were enterprises and software solutions using LLMs before November 30, 2023. However, they were limited, and few people believed there should be a sense of urgency around the technology’s adoption. The consumer version of an LLM solution changed that perception seemingly overnight. Business leaders and users quickly surmised that a ChatGPT-like solution could offer immediate productivity benefits and might quickly become a competitive necessity.
Beyond this, consumers decided this new application would benefit them for a variety of regular activities. ChatGPT did not create a new market for consumers. Digital assistants already existed. ChatGPT created a new digital assistant category—the knowing assistant— and simultaneously spurred consumer and enterprise interest.
ChatGPT reinvigorated and expanded the digital assistant category and the generative AI category at the same time. One year later, the impact is still evident in NVIDIA’s quarterly sales and the strategies of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and countless other software providers. Happy birthday, ChatGPT, and many more.
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Links to the Key ChatGPT News
2022
November 30: ChatGPT Launched
December 5: 1 million users
2023
January 17: Microsoft Announced Azure OpenAI Service, Including ChatGPT API
January 23: Microsoft Announced $10B OpenAI Investment
January 31: ChatGPT Racks up 4B Page Views
February 1: UBS Reports that ChatGPT Reached 100M Users in January
February 1: ChatGPT Plus Announced
February 7: Bing Chat Launched with ChatGPT-Style Search
March 14: GPT-4 Launched and added to ChatGPT Plus
March 23: OpenAI Announced ChatGPT Plugins and Code Interpreter
March 30: Italy Bans ChatGPT
April 28: ChatGPT Returns to Italy
May 18: ChatGPT iOS App Launched
July 1: a16z Estimates 2 Million ChatGPT Plus US Subscribers
July 22: ChatGPT Adds Custom Instructions
July 27: ChatGPT Android App Launched
August 3: YiptData Estimates ChatGPT Reached 230M Monthly Users
August 28: ChatGPT Enterprise Announced
September 20: ChatGPT Reconnects to the Internet
September 26:ChatGPT Adds Voice, Visual Features
October 11: ChatGPT Surpasses 50M Mobile App Downloads
November 6: ChatGPT Has 100M Weekly Users, GPTs Announced
November 8: ChatGPT Suffers DDoS Attack and Multiple Outages
November 14: OpenAI Halts New ChatGPT Plus Subscriptions
November 21: ChatGPT with Voice Rolls out to Free Users
November 30: ChatGPT Turns 1
