Generations from now, how will historians describe Nov. 30, 2022?
That was the day OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research organization headquartered in San Francisco, introduced ChatGPT to the known universe.
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OpenAI was founded in December 2015 by, among others, entrepreneur, investor, and current CEO Sam Altman and Tesla's chief executive Elon Musk, with a mission to develop “safe and beneficial” artificial general intelligence, defined as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”
"We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT, which interacts in a conversational way," OpenAi said on that first day. "The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests."
The chatbot was viewed in-house as a “research preview,” Sandhini Agarwal, who works on policy at OpenAI, told the MIT Technology Review; a tease of a more polished version of a two-year-old technology and an attempt to iron out some of its flaws by collecting feedback from the public.
“We didn’t want to oversell it as a big fundamental advance,” said Liam Fedus, a scientist at OpenAI who worked on ChatGPT.
The public reacted much differently to ChatGPT, and it went viral on social media, with users sharing examples of what it could do.
OpenAI CEO: 'Our tools part of people's lives'
"I think it was definitely a surprise for all of us how much people began using it," Agarwal said. "We work on these models so much, we forget how surprising they can be for the outside world sometimes."
Within five days of its release, the chatbot had attracted over one million users.
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By comparison, it took Instagram about 2.5 months to reach one million downloads, while Netflix had to wait around 3.5 years to reach one million users, according to Exploding Topics, which cited Statista, Reuters, and Similarweb.
"We are excited to introduce ChatGPT to get users’ feedback and learn about its strengths and weaknesses," OpenAI said.
OpenAI isn't the only one getting excited about ChatGPT. It now has more than 200 million weekly active users — twice as many as it had last November, Axios reported on Aug. 29.
OpenAI said over 90% of Fortune 500 companies are using its products, and usage of its automated Application Programming Interface (API) has doubled since the release of GPT-4o mini in July.
"People are using our tools now as a part of their daily lives, making a real difference in areas like healthcare and education—whether it's helping with routine tasks, solving hard problems, or unlocking creativity," Altman said in a statement to Axios.
In June, Apple (AAPL) named OpenAI the first official partner for its AI platform, Apple Intelligence. Apple's new AI will feature an improved Siri voice assistant, text proofreading, and custom emoji creation.
Apple CEO Tim Cook said the tech giant has big plans for the chatbot, including integrating ChatGPT into experiences within iPhone, Mac, and iPad, "enabling users to draw on a broad base of world knowledge."
"We are very excited about Apple Intelligence, and we remain incredibly optimistic about the extraordinary possibilities of AI and its ability to enrich customers’ lives," Cook told analysts during the company's third-quarter earnings call on Aug. 1.
"We will continue to make significant investments in this technology and dedicate ourselves to the innovation that will unlock its full potential."
Both Apple, which is slated to release its iPhone 16 series in September, and AI chipmaking behemoth Nvidia (NVDA) are looking to pump money into OpenAI to strengthen their positions in the highly competitive AI race.
Nvidia, undeniably the biggest beneficiary of the AI frenzy because of soaring demand for its AI semiconductor chips, has invested in other companies. In August, Nvidia's latest 13-F filing of holdings with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed it owned a total of nearly $400 million worth of five companies, including Arm Holdings.
The investment would be part of a new OpenAI fundraising round and value the ChatGPT maker above $100 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Venture capital firm Thrive Capital is leading the round, which will total several billion dollars, and software kingpin Microsoft (MSFT) is also expected to participate.
How much these tech heavyweights will invest in OpenAI this round has not been determined. To date, Microsoft has been the primary strategic investor in OpenAI; it gets a 49% share of the AI startup’s profits after investing $13 billion in multiple tranches since 2019.
Fighting for a piece of AI market
While OpenAI faces serious competition from other AI startups and big tech companies, ChatGPT remains a market leader.
Facebook parent Meta Platforms (META) said its Llama artificial intelligence models are being used by companies, including Goldman Sach (GS) , and AT&T (T) , for business functions like customer service, document review, and computer code generation
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Llama models have been downloaded almost 350 million times since Meta began releasing them publicly last year, an increase from the 300 million downloads the company announced when it released the biggest version of its latest Llama 3 model in late July.
Usage via cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure has also increased, more than doubling between May and July this year.
Gemini, formerly known as Bard, is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Google and rolled out last year.
The most popular search engine in the world got into trouble in February when users discovered that Gemini was unable to reliably create images of white people.
With the latest version of its image generator, Imagen 3, Google said, “We’ve made significant progress in providing a better user experience when generating images of people.”
“We don’t support the generation of photorealistic, identifiable individuals, depictions of minors or excessively gory, violent or sexual scenes,” Dave Citron, a Google senior director, said in a blog post.
On Aug. 28, Google, which shut down Gemini's ability to depict any human, began turning the feature back on for users who pay to use the English language version of the chatbot.
Elon Musk, who resigned from his seat on OpenAI's board in 2018 due to potential conflict of interest concerns regarding Tesla's AI development for self-driving cars, now runs his own artificial intelligence program called xAI.
In June, Musk threatened to ban iPhones, iPads, and Macs in the office if Apple integrated ChatGPT into the Apple operating system
The ban would be in effect for all his companies, including SpaceX and X, formerly Twitter, and even visitors would have to leave their devices at the door.
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