ChatGPT has revolutionized the world in a short period and continues to impact our lives. There is a common notion that OpenAI created it just two years ago, but that’s not true.
Its existence dates back to when a group of tech visionaries established OpenAI to achieve a common goal of mainstreaming AI usage.
OpenAI’s cutting-edge chatbot has transformed how society interacts with artificial intelligence, making us rely on it for various personal and professional purposes.
It’s no longer a futuristic concept but the reality of AI. It is constantly redefining the standards of artificial intelligence.
This article revealed that the vision to develop a know-it-all chatbot has become a full-fledged technological evolution impacting society. Here, we’ll explore the rise of ChatGPT, its brief timeline, and the critical milestones of the AI revolution.
The Origins and Rise of ChatGPT Over the Years
The story of ChatGPT’s revolution began with the inception of OpenAI in 2015. The company was founded by masterful technology zealots like Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Wojciech Zaremba, John Schulman, Ilya Sutskever, and Andrej Karpathy.
The core team members collaborated with their technology entrepreneurship, machine learning, and software engineering expertise to establish a non-profit AI research company to advance artificial intelligence and its mainstreaming worldwide.
Since then, multiple founding members have left the organization, including billionaire Elon Musk. Altman was also briefly stripped of his position in November 2023 but reinstated later. Despite the recent turbulence, ChatGPT continues to change the world and lead the AI revolution.
Here are the critical milestones in the discovery and development of ChatGPT:
June 2018: GPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) is Born
OpenAI introduced GPT-1 in June 2018, which internally marked the beginning of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) series. With its 117 million parameters, it showcased significant potential for unsupervised learning.
This large language model (LLM) could understand language by using books to predict a sentence’s next word. This was the beginning of the evolution of AI.
February 2019: The Transition to GPT-2
OpenAI introduced a significant upgrade to the GPT series with the launch of GPT-2, having 1.5 billion parameters. It significantly enhanced its ability to generate logical multi-paragraph texts. However, it wasn’t made available to the public due to concerns about its potential abuse.
Instead, the company followed a staged rollout in November 2019 to responsibly analyze and mitigate potential risks. This paved the way for the future launch of successors to the public without societal concerns.
June 2020: The Launch of GPT-3
In June 2020, OpenAI launched GPT-3 with an astonishing 175 billion parameters to take the LLM’s capabilities to new peaks. This new model could write emails, essays, articles, and poetry, generate code, answer factual questions, and translate languages.
With an extensive range of use cases, GPT-3 was made available through an API to allow developers to integrate its powers into various applications. However, it was still not available to the public to interact directly.
January 2021: The Debut of DALL-E
In January 2021, OpenAI debuted DALL-E, an AI model capable of generating images from text descriptions. This groundbreaking system expanded AI’s creative potential and opened the way for its text-to-image applications.
November 2022: The Arrival of ChatGPT 3.5
This was the most paramount milestone in the evolution of OpenAI’s chatbot. ChatGPT, powered by GPT-3.5, was made publicly available for the first time in November 2022 as a research preview.
This was the first incident when the public could interact directly with the AI chatbot, marking a vital moment in widespread AI adoption. Major headlines were full of the terms ‘ChatGPT’ and ‘AI,’ as the media kept buzzing about it when this happened.
February 2023: The Introduction of ChatGPT Plus
In February 2023, ChatGPT rolled out its paid tier, “Plus.” It was initially made available in the U.S., followed by a global expansion. This subscription allowed users to enhance ChatGPT’s capabilities and performance and provided access to DALL-E 3, mainstreaming AI art.
March 2023: The Release of GPT-4
OpenAI introduced GPT-4 in March 2023 with prominent improvements in understanding and generating natural language, marking the pivotal moment in the chatbot’s evolution. This model made interactions more accurate and contextually relevant.
However, it was only available to the public through the ChatGPT Plus subscription. The rollout initially happened in the U.S. via a closed beta, followed by a global expansion later.
November 2023: GPT-4 Turbo is Introduced
With the launch of GPT -4 Turbo, OpenAI introduced further improvements in user experience, including better alignment with user intentions and context, reduced harmful content generation, improved factual accuracy, and higher conversation controllability.
It also brought along real-time internet connectivity, which significantly expanded its powers.
February 2024: Sora Makes its Debut
OpenAI recently launched Sora, a ground-breaking AI model designed to create realistic videos from text input. It is currently under development, and its full release is scheduled for later this year. It is a crucial moment in making video content generation using AI mainstream.
May 2024: The Launch of GPT-4o
OpenAI unveiled GPT-4o (o refers to omni) in May 2024. This is an advanced version of ChatGPT capable of processing a dynamic combination of inputs, including text, audio, image, and video, and delivering the desired output in multiple formats.
Its reaction times mirror human conversations, and it excels at seamless non-English text processing. This model can even understand vision and audio, setting a new understanding standard for AI systems.
Final Take: The Future of ChatGPT
ChatGPT has completely changed the way our society interacts with AI. People are now using artificial intelligence for various purposes across different sectors.
AI is now capable of many applications, from writing emails to composing songs, facilitating brainstorming sessions, and even producing complete movies.
The future of AI appears bright, with OpenAI leading the way. ChatGPT will soon introduce more developments and take the AI revolution further.
We must prepare ourselves with the best practices of using AI and stay ready to counter potential challenges arising from the widespread reliance on artificial intelligence.
What are your thoughts on the future of ChatGPT and AI? Sound off in the comments.