OpenAI released ChatGPT as a free research preview, offering a conversational interface to a large language model fine-tuned with human feedback.
The product reached an estimated hundred million monthly users within two months, drawing attention to capabilities in drafting, summarising, translation and code generation, and also to weaknesses including confident factual errors.
The launch set off an intense competitive response from Google, Anthropic, Meta and Chinese laboratories, and a rapid escalation in spending on data centres and specialised chips that reshaped the technology sector.
