The chat interface OpenAI put in front of GPT-3.5 on a Wednesday in November 2022, reportedly reaching a million users in five days and around a hundred million monthly users by January 2023. The record dates the AI hype era from this release: everything before it was a paper, everything after it was a product.
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December 2022, a university department email asking staff to 'be aware' of a new website, forwarded with the comment that it had already written the email. The record keeps both.
Correction: ChatGPT did not launch with GPT-4. It ran on a GPT-3.5 model for its first three and a half months; GPT-4 arrived for paying users on 14 March 2023.
I asked it to write a limerick about my boss on the first night and it did, badly, and I sat there for a while. That is the whole story of the next three years in one evening.
The record notes that the model underneath had been available through an API for months and nobody had queued for it. The queue formed when it was given a text box and the ability to say sorry.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
