ChatGPT turns one: The first year of the chatbot that changed the

It’s one year since the launch of ChatGPT.

Before it was unleashed upon the world on 30 November 2022, AI chatbots were broadly considered a joke.

It’s certainly hard to imagine anyone trusting Microsoft’s infamous Tay bot to help with homework or trip planning.

ChatGPT has had much more staying power, becoming part of daily life for hundreds of millions of people.

But it’s not all been plain sailing – and drama at creator OpenAI that saw CEO Sam Altman sent into exile was a timely reminder of why some observers have been more spooked than amazed.

Catching the world’s attention

OpenAI had been pretty unknown outside tech circles before last November, so few were taking much notice when ChatGPT was quietly released to the public.

It took its name from GPT-3.5, the company’s then-flagship large language model. That refers to an AI trained on enormous amounts of text and data, which can then respond to questions and prompts.

ChatGPT was all about giving these complicated concepts a friendly public face, packaging it up into a product that would look familiar to anyone who’s used a messaging app.

When early adopters started sharing how it could do anything from writing poetry to debugging computer code, its accessibility meant even casual observers (and recently hired reporters) were tempted to try it for themselves.

Read more:
ChatGPT helped me write an article – here’s how it went

The AI arms race begins

With 100 million users by January 2023, ChatGPT quickly became the fastest-growing app in history – a record broken just a few months later by Meta’s Threads.

Its success was a surprise even to its…