The release of ChatGPT had set off the AI revolution, upturning industries, jobs and leading to questions about what it means to be human, but its launch hadn’t come with any of the accompanying fanfare.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had launched ChatGPT on X through a simple post. There was little to tell from the announcement that ChatGPT that would become the fastest product in history to reach 100 million users, and is become the fifth most-visited website in the world.
“Today we launched ChatGPT. Try talking with it here: http://chat.openai.com,” Altman had posted on X on 1st December 2022.
Altman said that while he believed that language interfaces would be big going forward, he hastened to add that ChatGPT was an early demo. “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),” he had added.
Incredibly, Altman had predicted the rise of AI agents and tools like Deep Research even back then. “Soon you will be able to have helpful assistants that talk to you, answer questions, and give advice. Later you can have something that goes off and does tasks for you. Eventually you can have something that goes off and discovers new knowledge for you,” he had said.
“But this same interface works for all of that. This is something that sci-fi really god right; until we get neural interfaces, language interfaces are probably the next best thing,” he said. The post was likely shared on the fly, and even had a typo — Altman had said “god right” instead of got right. “got right! bad typo!!” he’d added to his original thread.
But while some popular products receive lukewarm feedback when they’re first launched, ChatGPT seemed to instantly amaze people with its abilities. Some users said that they were impressed with what it was able to do.
Others called the release “wild”.
Some said that it was more thoughtful than many humans.
Others predicted how it would be used by children for their homework. “Kids never gonna do their own homework innit,” said a poster.
Someone even wrote a note under Sam’s post. “I was here on day one,” they said.
As it turned out, ChatGPT did end up being a massive hit. While companies like Google, Meta and Anthropic had similarly-capable technologies at the time, they either didn’t release them to the public, or released them in a form that didn’t see broad public adoption. ChatGPT was a magical moment for many, and the app instantly went viral. OpenAI’s engineers scrambled to keep up with the traffic, and ChatGPT became the fastest platform in history to hit 100 million users. ChatGPT has since gone from strength to strength — it now has 700 million weekly active users, and is the fifth-most visited website in the world. And while there are now many competitors — Google, Anthropic and xAI now all have models that compete directly with OpenAI — ChatGPT will forever retain its place as the first truly mainstream app that brought the magic of AI to the world.