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OpenAI launches ChatGPT as a free research preview

OpenAI released ChatGPT on 30 November 2022 as a free research preview built on GPT-3.5. It reached one million users within five days, and analysts at UBS estimated roughly 100 million monthly users by January 2023, a pace that had taken TikTok nine months and Instagram about two and a half years.

Software engineering Real-world deployment Deployed

Background

By late 2022 large language models could already do most of what ChatGPT did. GPT-3 had been available through an API since 2020, and instruction tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback had both been published. What none of that had produced was a way for an ordinary person to use one.

Access ran through an API key, a developer account and a prompt written to suit a completion model rather than a conversation. The capability existed and almost nobody outside the field had touched it.

What happened

OpenAI released ChatGPT on 30 November 2022 as a free research preview, built on GPT-3.5, a version of GPT-3 tuned to follow instructions and hold a conversation.

One million people signed up within five days. Analysts at UBS, working from Similarweb data and reported by Reuters, estimated roughly 100 million monthly users by January 2023. TikTok had taken about nine months to reach the same figure and Instagram around two and a half years.

What followed

Competing products appeared within months across every major laboratory, and the conversational interface became the ordinary way people encountered artificial intelligence.

The technical claim was contested at the time and remains so. Yann LeCun, then chief AI scientist at Meta, said in February 2023 that the system was not particularly innovative and that its components had existed in the literature for at least two years. That is a fair description of the model and beside the point about the event: what was new was that the capability had reached everybody at once.

Why it mattered

The underlying model was not new. What changed was access: a capable language model reached the public through a text box that needed no instruction, at no cost. Within months the interface had become the ordinary way people encountered artificial intelligence, and every major laboratory had shipped a competing product.

Sources

Cite this page

AI Achievements. (2022). OpenAI launches ChatGPT as a free research preview. Retrieved 2026-08-29, from https://achievements.ai/milestone/openai-launches-chatgpt 

@misc{achievements_openai_launches_chatgpt,
  title  = {OpenAI launches ChatGPT as a free research preview},
  author = {{AI Achievements}},
  year   = {2022},
  url    = {https://achievements.ai/milestone/openai-launches-chatgpt}
}