Release of ChatGPT and the rise of generative AI
- Date
- 30 November 2022
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- Global
- Era
- Contemporary
- Significance
On 30 November 2022 the American company OpenAI released ChatGPT, a free conversational chatbot built on a large language model, as a research preview.
Able to write essays and computer code, answer questions, summarise documents and hold fluent dialogue in natural language, ChatGPT reached an estimated one million users within five days and around 100 million monthly users within two months, making it among the fastest-adopted consumer technologies in history. It brought generative artificial intelligence, systems that create text, images, audio and video, to mainstream public attention and touched off intense competition among technology companies, which raced to release rival models and embed AI into search, software and productivity tools. The launch built on the deep-learning advances of the preceding decade, especially the 2017 transformer architecture, and on successive GPT models. ChatGPT's spread provoked far-reaching debates about education, employment, copyright, misinformation, bias and the long-term risks of advanced AI, and prompted governments to begin drafting regulation. It is widely seen as a turning point that accelerated the integration of artificial intelligence into everyday life and the global economy.
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Further reading
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