“How ChatGPT Kicked Off an AI Arms Race: Even inside the Company, the Chatbot’s Popularity Has Come As Something of a Shock”, 2023-02-03 ():
One day in mid-November, workers at OpenAI got an unexpected assignment: Release a chatbot, fast. The chatbot, an executive announced, would be known as “Chat with GPT-3.5”, and it would be made available free to the public. In two weeks.
The announcement confused some OpenAI employees. All year, the San Francisco artificial intelligence company had been working toward the release of GPT-4, a new AI model that was stunningly good at writing essays, solving complex coding problems and more. After months of testing and fine-tuning, GPT-4 was nearly ready. The plan was to release the model in early 2023, along with a few chatbots that would allow users to try it for themselves, according to 3 people with knowledge of the inner workings of OpenAI.
But OpenAI’s top executives had changed their minds. Some were worried that rival companies might upstage them by releasing their own AI chatbots before GPT-4, according to the people with knowledge of OpenAI. And putting something out quickly using an old model, they reasoned, could help them collect feedback to improve the new one.
So they decided to dust off and update an unreleased chatbot that used a souped-up version of GPT-3, the company’s previous language model, which came out in 2020. 13 days later, ChatGPT was born.
…Before ChatGPT’s launch, some OpenAI employees were skeptical that the project would succeed. An AI chatbot that Facebook had released months earlier, BlenderBot, had flopped, and another Facebook AI project, Galactica, was pulled down after just 3 days. Some employees, desensitized by daily exposure to state-of-the-art AI systems, thought that a chatbot built on a two-year-old AI model might seem boring [cf. Fortune].
But two months after its debut, ChatGPT has more than 30 million users and gets roughly 5 million visits a day, two people with knowledge of the figures said. That makes it one of the fastest-growing software products in memory. (Instagram, by contrast, took nearly a year to get its first 10 million users.)
The growth has brought challenges. ChatGPT has had frequent outages as it runs out of processing power, and users have found ways around some of the bot’s safety features. The hype surrounding ChatGPT has also annoyed some rivals at bigger tech firms [like Facebook], who have pointed out that its underlying technology isn’t, strictly speaking, all that new.
ChatGPT is also, for now, a money pit. There are no ads, and the average conversation costs the company “single-digit cents” in processing power, according to a post on Twitter by Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, likely amounting to millions of dollars a week. To offset the costs, the company announced this week that it would begin selling a $20 monthly subscription, known as “ChatGPT Plus”.
Despite its limitations, ChatGPT’s success has vaulted OpenAI into the ranks of Silicon Valley power players. The company recently reached a $10 billion deal with Microsoft, which plans to incorporate the start-up’s technology into its Bing search engine and other products. Google declared a “code red” in response to ChatGPT, fast-tracking many of its own AI products in an attempt to catch up.
…As ChatGPT has captured the world’s imagination, Mr. Altman has been put in the rare position of trying to downplay a hit product. He is worried that too much hype for ChatGPT could provoke a regulatory backlash or create inflated expectations for future releases, two people familiar with his views said…He has also discouraged employees from boasting about ChatGPT’s success. In December, days after the company announced that more than a million people had signed up for the service, Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, tweeted that it had reached two million users. Mr. Altman asked him to delete the tweet, telling him that advertising such rapid growth was unwise, two people who saw the exchange said.
…Back in Silicon Valley, he is navigating a frenzy of new attention. In addition to the $10 billion Microsoft deal, Mr. Altman has met with top executives at Apple and Google in recent weeks, two people with knowledge of the meetings said. OpenAI also inked a deal with BuzzFeed to use its technology to create AI-generated lists and quizzes. (The announcement more than doubled BuzzFeed’s stock price.)