Since its launch a year ago, ChatGPT has not only revolutionized the AI landscape but also prompted significant reactions from the public, governments, the legal system, competitors, and the tech world in general. This post outlines a brief timeline of key events, offering an overview of ChatGPT’s impact on technology and society.

• 06/11/2018 – OpenAI announces GPT, the first of its GPT series of language models.
• 02/14/2019 – OpenAI launches GPT-2, a more capable follow-up to GPT.
• 05/28/2020 – OpenAI announces GPT-3, its most powerful language model to date.
• 11/30/2022 – ChatGPT launches publicly as a free research project, using GPT-3.5.
• 12/05/2022 – Six days after launch, Sam Altman announces that ChatGPT has reached 1 million users.
• 01/20/2023 – NYT reports that Google begins to double down on generative AI projects, spooked by ChatGPT.
• 01/23/2023 – Microsoft and OpenAI extend their partnership to the tune of US $10 billion.
• 02/01/2023 – OpenAI launches ChatGPT Plus, a $20/month subscription service.
• 02/01/2023 – ChatGPT becomes the fastest growing consumer application of all time, reaching 100 million monthly users.
• 02/07/2023 – Microsoft launches an early version of Bing Chat, a conversational bot secretly based on GPT-4.
• 02/24/2023 – Meta releases LLaMA, a research LLM that spawns an open source ChatGPT clone movement.
• 02/27/2023 – Snapchat announces My AI conversational chatbot, based on technology from OpenAI.
• 03/01/2023 – The ChatGPT API debuts, allowing developers to integrate the chatbot into their apps.
• 03/14/2023 – The GPT-4 language model launches and comes to ChatGPT for the first time.
• 03/14/2023 – Anthropic launches an early access version of Claude Instant, its ChatGPT competitor.
• 03/21/2023 – Google launches a limited preview of Google Bard, its answer to ChatGPT.
• 03/21/2023 – Brian Hood tells OpenAI he plans to sue for defamation due to false generations from ChatGPT. The issue is later settled out of court.
• 03/22/2023 – The Future of Life Institute calls for a six-month pause in AI development in response to GPT-4.
• 03/23/2023 – OpenAI announces ChatGPT Plugins, which allow the bot to tie into different external functions.
• 04/25/2023 – OpenAI introduces ChatGPT privacy features, such as disabling chat history.
• 05/10/2023 – Google Bard chatbot launches to all users in the US.
• 05/16/2023 – OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testifies about the dangers of AI at a US Senate hearing.
• 05/18/2023 – OpenAI releases the ChatGPT app for iOS.
• 05/24/2023 – Lawyer Steven Schwartz apologizes to judge for citing six fake legal cases confabulated by ChatGPT.
• 07/11/2023 – Anthropic launches Claude 2, an AI assistant with a ChatGPT-like interface.
• 07/19/2023 – Bloomberg reports that Apple has developed its own internal chatbot, Ajax.
• 07/20/2023 – The Custom Instructions feature allows users to set a persistent ChatGPT personality between sessions.
• 07/26/2023 – OpenAI releases the ChatGPT app for Android.
• 08/28/2023 – OpenAI launches ChatGPT Enterprise, aimed at businesses.
• 09/20/2023 – AI image generator DALL-E 3 comes to ChatGPT in wide release.
• 09/25/2023 – ChatGPT goes multimodal with the ability to interpret images and converse with voice synthesis.
• 11/06/2023 – GPT-4 Turbo comes to ChatGPT, pushing its knowledge cutoff from September 2021 to April 2023.
• 11/06/2023 – OpenAI introduces GPTs, which are roles ChatGPT can play using custom prompts and API interfaces.
• 11/15/2023 – Microsoft calls itself “the Copilot company” after its reorientation around AI tech from OpenAI.
• 11/17/2023 – OpenAI’s board fires Sam Altman in a surprise move. He officially returns as CEO on November 29, 2023.
• 11/28/2023 – Amazon announces Amazon Q, its enterprise-focused ChatGPT competitor.