OpenAI launches ChatGPT, kicking off an AI boom
A free chatbot able to answer questions and write text in fluent prose was released to the public and drew millions of users within days.
The artificial intelligence company OpenAI released a chatbot called ChatGPT on Wednesday, a free research preview that could answer questions, write essays, draft computer code and hold conversations in remarkably fluent language — and that would quickly become one of the fastest-adopted technologies in history.
Within days, people around the world were using it to compose emails, explain difficult concepts, write poems and brainstorm ideas, sharing screenshots of its often impressive and occasionally bizarre responses. The tool reached an estimated one million users within its first week and would go on to reach a hundred million within two months.
ChatGPT was built on a type of system known as a large language model, trained on vast amounts of text to predict the most likely next word in a sequence. The result could be strikingly human-like, though the system was also prone to producing confident-sounding answers that were factually wrong, a tendency researchers called "hallucination".
The launch set off a wave of excitement and anxiety. Technology giants raced to release their own AI products, investment poured into the field, and schools, employers and governments scrambled to understand the implications for education, work and the spread of misinformation.
What had been a specialist research field suddenly became a mainstream phenomenon. The debut of ChatGPT marked the moment generative AI arrived in the public consciousness, opening a period of rapid development whose long-term consequences remained hotly contested.