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ChatGPT Celebrates Its First, What A Year It’s Been…

Suchita Gopal Sail Dec 01, 2023

While the OpenAI board saga is still in talks, 30th November marks the first anniversary of the company’s chatbot, ChatGPT. The generative AI chatbot was unveiled last year and since then has been creating history. In just two months after its launch, ChatGPT was recognised as the fastest-growing consumer application and has emerged as a competitor to tech majors like Google, X, Meta and Amazon among others.

While ChatGPT is still a baby, its first 365 days have been nothing short of a roller coaster ride. Here’s how the application has survived for its first year.

The First Milestone:

ChatGPT took the online applications space by storm when it hit one million users in just five days after its release. This was huge in comparison to other popular applications that took several months to reach the one million user base. According to a Reuters report, TikTok took nine months, while Instagram made it in two and a half years.

ChatGPT’s Highest Android Traction:

Six months following the official launch of ChatGPT's website and its subsequent introduction to Apple's iOS in May, followed by the Android release in July. While the iOS release marked the initial introduction, interestingly, the downloads on Android surpassed those on iOS, indicating a robust and growing user interest in the Android ecosystem.

ChatGPT’s Impact In Every Sector:

The AI chatbot created a massive change in every industrial sector as well as individual users. It opened up a massive conversation of spending in companies to implement chatbots and other tools enabled by large language models (LLMs). The tech giants allured by the OpenAI invention invested billions to improve their cloud computing capabilities and take on more AI workloads as businesses started embracing such tools. A Reuters report underlined that Microsoft, Google and Amazon increased their spending on data centres with AI booming elsewhere and OpenAI’s popularity.

ChatGPT Can See, Hear And Speak:

After its premium service launch in February 2023, GPT-4 was released on 14 March 2023 and was made available via API and for premium ChatGPT users, but this feature had a limit tightening to 25 messages every three hours in response to increased demand. In March 2023, ChatGPT users got another moment to celebrate as they were given access to third-party plugins and a browsing mode (with Internet access). This was all good, but to make the chatbot more user-friendly, OpenAI in September 2023 upgraded ChatGPT so that it can see, hear and speak with users and interact using images. This was disruptive for other popular AI assistance like Apple's Siri, Google’s voice assistance and Amazon’s Alexa.

The Dominance Despite Competition:

ChatGPT has been one of the go-to services for many since it was made publicly available last year. But the chatbot is not the only framework for AI. Today, ChatGPT's competitors include Google’s Bard, Microsoft's CoPilot, Anthropic's Claude and Character.AI which have also seen a surge in their downloads and are popular among users. But despite the stiff competition, ChatGPT is leading the popularity chart.

Controversies:

While ChatGPT's uncannily human-like responses have taken the world by storm, the popular chatbot has been marred by controversies which are a mix of misconception and genuine observation. Let’s check what ChatGPT had to say about its own controversies.