OpenAI Releases ChatGPT for Free — The Day Conversational AI Changed the World
On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released the conversational AI “ChatGPT” as a free research preview. Beyond simply answering questions, it could admit mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests — conversational abilities that quickly became a sensation. Registered users surpassed 1 million within just five days of launch, and ChatGPT became the spark that brought generative AI into the mainstream.
Details
- Base model: Built by fine-tuning a model from the GPT-3.5 series, using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to tune it for dialogue — positioned as a sibling model to InstructGPT
- Availability: Released as a free research preview accessible to anyone at chatgpt.com, with OpenAI stating it would continue to improve the model based on user feedback
- Explosive growth: Surpassed 1 million users in 5 days. By January 2023 it had reached 100 million monthly active users, at the time being called “the fastest-growing consumer application in history”
- Known limitations: OpenAI itself acknowledged at launch that the model could produce plausible-sounding but incorrect answers, and was sensitive to how a prompt was phrased
What happened next
ChatGPT’s explosive popularity ignited a generative AI arms race among major tech companies including Microsoft, Google, and Meta. The paid “ChatGPT Plus” tier launched in February 2023, followed by the successor model “GPT-4” in March, and ChatGPT went on to become the starting point of an AI boom that has continued for years.