Two Years of ChatGPT: Changing Tech One Prompt at a Time
Maneesha Tiwari
Content Strategy Leader & GenAI Expert | Editorial Quality @ Scale | Ex-Microsoft, Reuters, BBC
The AI News Articulator Issue #26? (November 23, 2024 - November 30, 2024)
Hello and welcome back to a new edition of the AI News Articulator. While you may not remember what you were doing on November 30, 2022, I would guess - wrapping up your year, planning holiday celebrations, taking time off, all of the usual year-end activities. What you were definitely not doing is writing a LinkedIn post, a pesky business email, or creating an image using natural language, through an AI chatbot. Because most of us were blissfully unaware that OpenAI had just quietly released a tool that would fundamentally reshape how we think, write, and create.
ChatGPT entered our lives with little fanfare – just another AI chatbot in a sea of digital tools. But oh, how wrong we were about "just another chatbot." This week I look at the ups and downs of two years of ChatGPT, and its parent company, OpenAI, its place in our lives, and how the chatbot has shaped, fueled, and become a benchmark for an entire industry.
Two Months, 100 Million Monthly Users, One AI
The ChatGPT we knew in 2022 feels like a flip phone compared to today's smartphone-like version of the chatbot. If?
The chatbot, which took just two months to hit 100 million monthly users, has been learning and growing its knowledge base from the millions or even billions of user queries it processes every day. For perspective, Instagram took roughly 2.5 years, Facebook took 4.5 years and Twitter took 3.5 years after they were launched to reach the 100 million users milestone.?
ChatGPT has been learning from us almost as much as we have been learning from it. Today, ChatGPT has over 180 million active users and 4 billion monthly website visits.
This explosive growth has not come easy. OpenAI has been kept on its toes, as competitors like Anthropic, Gemini, Llama, CoPilot close the distance quickly.?
Users of the chatbot have even complained that OpenAI takes far too long between upgrades, compared to other AI products. In 2024, ChatGPT went multimodal and added voice, audio and video capabilities. In September, OpenAI released its reasoning model, o1, and moved to patent it this past week. The company, which has its sights set on AGI, is reportedly planning to release its own AI Agent named ‘Operator’ early next year.
ChatGPT's two-year journey is like watching a time-lapse of technological evolution. From a simple text-based assistant in 2022, to handling images and voice, then solving complex problems that would make most computers sweat, and now it's about to become something even more impressive – a digital agent that can work independently. All this in the time it takes most of us to master a new hobby!
It Hasn’t All Been Smooth Sailing
The promise of advanced AI technology available for free seemed like a gift to the world, but reality soon set in. Media organizations, including The New York Times and Canadian publishers, have taken legal action against OpenAI for using their content to train ChatGPT without permission or compensation.
Beyond these legal battles lies a deeper environmental challenge. The massive data centers powering ChatGPT and similar AI systems consume enormous amounts of water and energy for cooling and operations. While this environmental cost isn't unique to OpenAI, it raises important questions about the sustainability of AI tools that millions use everyday..
A Year of High-Profile Departures
OpenAI's internal challenges proved as dramatic as its technological achievements. The first half of 2024 saw a series of high-profile departures, starting with chief scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever, followed by the dissolution of the company's superalignment team – a group dedicated to ensuring responsible AI development. The exodus continued with CTO Mira Murati and several other senior executives stepping down, raising concerns about the concentration of power under CEO Sam Altman's leadership.
These departures, particularly of key figures involved in AI safety and ethics, sparked intense debate about OpenAI's direction and governance structure. What began as individual resignations quickly evolved into a larger conversation about leadership, power dynamics, and? responsible AI development.
New Contenders Push Forward??
As with any groundbreaking idea or product, there is always a competitor around the corner vying for the top spot. For Open AI and ChatGPT, the competition is stiff, and is being doled out by the big players in tech - Google with its chatbot, Gemini, Meta with Llama, Anthropic with Claude.?
To add to this, the latest challenge to the company’s o1 model comes from Alibaba. QwQ-32B-Preview, a 32.5 billion parameter language model, excels in reasoning tasks, and has outperformed OpenAI's o1-preview and o1-mini models on some benchmarks like AIME and MATH, Alibaba said.
Beyond Prompts: Shaping AI's Next Chapter
ChatGPT has made what seemed like sci-fi just two years ago feel almost ordinary today. Sure, we're wrestling with serious questions about ethics, environmental impact, and AI governance. But here's what we cannot ignore - ChatGPT hasn't just raised the bar for AI capabilities; it has completely transformed our relationship with technology.?
As OpenAI works steadily towards its goal of AGI, we find ourselves at a unique moment in history, where we’re not just witnessing the evolution of artificial intelligence, but actively shaping how it integrates into our world. The question now is, what story do we want to tell?
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What do you think? Drop your thoughts in the comments. I'd love to hear your ChatGPT stories and how it helped you or didn’t!
And with that, I will wrap up this week's edition of the AI News Articulator. If you found the insights and curated news on AI valuable, subscribe here. See you next week!?
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