Simon Willison’s Weblog

It's ChatGPT's third birthday today.

It's fun looking back at Sam Altman's low key announcement thread from November 30th 2022:

today we launched ChatGPT. try talking with it here:

chat.openai.com

language interfaces are going to be a big deal, i think. talk to the computer (voice or text) and get what you want, for increasingly complex definitions of "want"!

this is an early demo of what's possible (still a lot of limitations--it's very much a research release). [...]

We later learned from Forbes in February 2023 that OpenAI nearly didn't release it at all:

Despite its viral success, ChatGPT did not impress employees inside OpenAI. “None of us were that enamored by it,” Brockman told Forbes. “None of us were like, ‘This is really useful.’” This past fall, Altman and company decided to shelve the chatbot to concentrate on domain-focused alternatives instead. But in November, after those alternatives failed to catch on internally—and as tools like Stable Diffusion caused the AI ecosystem to explode—OpenAI reversed course.

MIT Technology Review's March 3rd 2023 story The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it provides an interesting oral history of those first few months:

Jan Leike: It’s been overwhelming, honestly. We’ve been surprised, and we’ve been trying to catch up.

John Schulman: I was checking Twitter a lot in the days after release, and there was this crazy period where the feed was filling up with ChatGPT screenshots. I expected it to be intuitive for people, and I expected it to gain a following, but I didn’t expect it to reach this level of mainstream popularity.

Sandhini Agarwal: I think it was definitely a surprise for all of us how much people began using it. We work on these models so much, we forget how surprising they can be for the outside world sometimes.

It's since been described as one of the most successful consumer software launches of all time, signing up a million users in the first five days and reaching 800 million monthly users by November 2025, three years after that initial low-key launch.