Technology · 2022
Generative AI: ChatGPT
San Francisco (OpenAI headquarters, USA)
On 30 November 2022 the San Francisco company OpenAI released ChatGPT, a chatbot, free to use in its basic form, built on a large language model, a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) trained on huge amounts of text, that could answer questions, write essays and computer code, translate and summarise in everyday language. The models behind it rest on the transformer, a design introduced in 2017 by eight Google researchers in the paper "Attention Is All You Need", which has since been cited more than 150,000 times.
ChatGPT gained one million users in five days and 100 million in two months, then the fastest growth of any internet application.
Why it mattered
ChatGPT brought artificial intelligence that can produce text, images and code into everyday use and sped up an AI boom of rapid investment and public attention; by February 2026 it had 900 million weekly users. It has raised hopes of transforming many professions, and debate over the future of work, cheating in education, misinformation, copyright and the confident but false answers known as "hallucinations".
Elsewhere
Transformers were first built to improve machine translation; their "attention" mechanism lets a model weigh how every word in a passage relates to every other, which turned out to work for many other tasks.
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