From accident to US$86 billion startup: One year of ChatGPT
OpenAI launched ChatGPT one year ago today, catapulting the company and the service into the Big Tech stratosphere. But as its recent stumbles show, that momentum isn't guaranteed to persist.
OpenAI was never meant to have the year that it had. When the company launched ChatGPT on November 30, one year ago today, it did so as a test.
OpenAI’s mission was, and ostensibly remains, safe and ethical artificial intelligence development. ChatGPT launched as a “research preview”. The aim was to drip feed awareness to the public about how advanced AI had become and also to collect data on how people used it.
Except it became a tsunami, not a drip feed. The most optimistic estimate among employees was that ChatGPT would get 100,000 users, according to an Atlantic report. Instead it hit 100 million within two months. Since then ChatGPT seeped into finance, law and media, and is on track to gross USD1 billion from paying customers and corporate clients like Morgan Stanley. Crucially, it concentrated the whole world on the potential — and the potential dangers – of AI.
It is hard to overstate ChatGPT’s impact. By the time of its launch, years of overzealous hype had rendered “AI'' a worn out buzz-phrase. In delivering a tangible product that could intuitively demonstrate that there is reality to that hype, OpenAI gave the technology its much-needed iPhone moment. For its services, it's been privately valued at around USD86 billion.
