OpenAI's assistant product, launched 30 November 2022. It put a language model in front of a general audience and made conversational answering a surface that competes with search.
ChatGPT is OpenAI's assistant product, launched on 30 November 2022. It put a large language model behind a chat box for a general audience, reached 100 million users inside two months, and made conversational answering a surface that competes with a results page.
The underlying GPT models existed before it. The product added a chat format with retained history, an instruction layer above the user's turn (see system prompt), and RLHF tuning for instruction following. Later additions moved it from a closed-book model to a retrieval system: browsing, then search, then tool use, file upload, image input and memory across sessions.
When ChatGPT answers from live retrieval it fetches pages and cites some of them, which is a different path from answering out of parametric memory. Only the retrieved path produces links, so appearing in ChatGPT answers depends on being reachable by OpenAI's crawlers and on being returned by its retrieval layer.
