ChatGPT Launched

On 30 November 2022, OpenAI published a short blog post: "Introducing ChatGPT." About a thousand words. Internally framed as a "research preview"—a low-key release.

Within days, it had become the fastest-growing consumer service in the history of the consumer internet.

Speed

• One million users in five days.
• One hundred million users in two months.

For comparison: Instagram took roughly two and a half years to reach 100 million; TikTok roughly nine months; Facebook roughly four and a half years. ChatGPT took two months.

This is the spread pattern not of a new service, but of a new piece of infrastructure.

Why

Technically, ChatGPT was the existing language model GPT-3.5 fine-tuned for dialogue. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)—where human raters select preferable replies, and that feedback shapes behaviour—was applied with unusual care for its time.

But the decisive factor was not the technique. The decisive factor was the interface.

GPT-3 (2020) had been distributed as an API. To use it, a developer had to register, write code, tune parameters—a staircase. ChatGPT removed the staircase entirely.

• Open a URL.
• Type a question.
• Read the answer.

That was it. Even an account was not required at first (it was added later).

Strategic Pivots

Within a month, the New York Times reported that Google had declared a "Code Red" internally (December 2022). CEO Sundar Pichai reversed a multi-year posture of "AI released cautiously" and ordered an acceleration of Bard (later renamed Gemini).

Microsoft had already invested more than US$1 billion in OpenAI (2019) and held an exclusive cloud arrangement. In January 2023 it announced an additional ten billion. In February, "New Bing" launched, integrating GPT-4 into search; Bard launched at roughly the same time.

Anthropic—founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei and others who had left OpenAI—shipped Claude in March 2023. Meta released LLaMA to researchers in February 2023.

In the six months from December 2022 to June 2023, the industry switched, completely, from a 'research then gradually productise' cadence to a continuous 'ship-improve-ship-improve' cadence.

Into Ordinary Life

In schools, debate over whether submitted essays were ChatGPT-generated began immediately. The New York City public school system blocked ChatGPT on its networks in January 2023 (later reversed). Coding interviews, legal briefs, medical notes, copywriting—every form of "produce text" work felt the impact within weeks.

Perhaps this was always coming. But the fact that it began on 30 November 2022 will be recorded as a particular date.