ChatGPT has revolutionized the world in a short space of time and continues to impact our lives. There is a common belief that OpenAI created it only two years ago, but that is not true.
Its existence dates back to when a group of technology visionaries founded OpenAI with the common goal of mainstreaming the use of AI.
OpenAI’s cutting-edge chatbots are transforming the way society interacts with artificial intelligence, leading us to rely on it for a variety of personal and professional purposes.
This is no longer a futuristic concept but an AI reality, which is constantly redefining the standards of artificial intelligence.
In this article, we reveal how the vision of developing an all-knowing chatbot has become a full-fledged technological evolution with social implications. Here, we explore the rise of ChatGPT, its brief timeline, and key milestones in the AI revolution.
ChatGPT origins and growth history
ChatGPT’s revolutionary story began with the founding of OpenAI in 2015. The company was founded by leading tech enthusiasts including Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Vojciech Zaremba, John Shulman, Ilya Sutskever, and Andrei Karpathy.
The core team members came together, leveraging their expertise in technology entrepreneurship, machine learning, and software engineering, to found a non-profit AI research company to advance artificial intelligence and its global adoption.
Since then, several founding members, including billionaire Elon Musk, have left the organization. Altman was also temporarily removed from his position in November 2023, but later reinstated. Despite the recent turmoil, ChatGPT continues to change the world and lead the AI revolution.
Important milestones in the discovery and development of ChatGPT include:
June 2018: Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) is born
OpenAI released GPT-1 in June 2018, which internally marked the beginning of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) series. With 117 million parameters, it demonstrated the great potential of unsupervised learning.
This Large Scale Language Model (LLM) was able to understand language by using books to predict the next word in a sentence, and this was the beginning of the evolution of AI.
February 2019: Transition to GPT-2
OpenAI introduced a major upgrade to the GPT series with the release of GPT-2, which had 1.5 billion parameters, greatly improving its ability to generate coherent multi-paragraph text, but it was not made publicly available due to concerns about its potential for misuse.
Instead, the company conducted a phased rollout in November 2019 to responsibly analyze and mitigate potential risks, paving the way for a future public launch of a successor product without public concern.
June 2020: GPT-3 launched
In June 2020, OpenAI released GPT-3 with a staggering 175 billion parameters to take LLM’s capabilities to a new level. This new model can write emails, essays, articles, and poems, generate code, answer factual questions, translate languages, and more.
GPT-3 supports a wide range of use cases and has been made available through APIs, allowing developers to integrate its capabilities into a variety of applications, but it has not been made available for the public to interact with directly.
January 2021: DALL-E debuts
In January 2021, OpenAI unveiled DALL-E, an AI model that can generate images from text descriptions. This groundbreaking system expands the creative potential of AI and paves the way for text-to-image applications.
November 2022: ChatGPT 3.5 is here
This was the most significant milestone in OpenAI’s chatbot evolution: ChatGPT, powered by GPT-3.5, was first made publicly available in November 2022 as a research preview.
This was the first time that regular people could directly interact with an AI chatbot, marking a key moment in the adoption of AI. The media was buzzing about it, with major headlines filled with the words “ChatGPT” and “AI.”
February 2023: Introducing ChatGPT Plus
In February 2023, ChatGPT introduced a paid plan called “Plus,” initially available in the United States and then expanding globally. This subscription gives users access to DALL-E 3, which enhances ChatGPT’s features and performance and brings the art of AI to the mainstream.
March 2023: Release of GPT-4
OpenAI introduced GPT-4 in March 2023, marking a pivotal moment in the evolution of chatbots, with notable improvements in natural language understanding and generation. The model made interactions more accurate and contextually relevant.
However, it was only made available to the public through the ChatGPT Plus subscription. The rollout was initially in the US through a closed beta and then expanded globally.
November 2023: GPT-4 Turbo will be introduced
With the release of GPT -4 Turbo, OpenAI has introduced further improvements to user experience, including better alignment with user intent and context, reducing harmful content generation, improving factual accuracy, and giving greater control over conversations.
It also introduced real-time Internet connectivity, greatly expanding its capabilities.
February 2024: SORA debuts
OpenAI recently announced Sora, a groundbreaking AI model designed to create lifelike videos from text input. It is currently in development and expected to be fully released later this year. This marks a key moment in bringing AI-powered video content generation to the mainstream.
May 2024: Launch of GPT-4o
OpenAI announced GPT-4o (the o stands for omni) in May 2024, an advanced version of ChatGPT that can process dynamic combinations of inputs such as text, audio, images, and video, and provide desired outputs in multiple formats.
Its reaction times are similar to human speech and it excels at seamlessly processing non-English text.The model also understands vision and speech, setting a new standard of understanding for AI systems.
Final conclusion: The future of ChatGPT
ChatGPT has completely changed the way our society interacts with AI. Now, people are using artificial intelligence in different fields and for different purposes.
AI can now be used for a variety of purposes, from writing emails to composing songs, facilitating brainstorming sessions, and even producing entire movies.
The future of AI is bright and with OpenAI leading the way, ChatGPT will soon introduce further developments to further drive the AI revolution.
We must arm ourselves with best practices in the use of AI and be prepared to combat potential challenges that arise from widespread reliance on artificial intelligence.
What do you think about ChatGPT and the future of AI? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
