Listen: ChatGPT
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.
Transcript
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, it put a powerful language model behind a simple chat box. It took just two months to reach one hundred million users, transforming how we find information and competing directly with traditional search engines.
The underlying technology already existed, but the product wrapped it in a conversational format that remembers chat history. It added a hidden layer of instructions, and used reinforcement learning from human feedback to make the model better at following directions. Over time, it evolved from a closed system into a tool that can browse the web, search, process files, and analyze images.
Today, when ChatGPT searches the live web, it fetches pages and cites its sources. This is very different from relying purely on its built-in memory. For creators and websites, appearing in these conversational answers now depends on being reachable by OpenAI's web crawlers and fitting into its retrieval system.