Skip to content
forward pass

· turning point

ChatGPT

OpenAI puts a chat interface on an instruction-tuned GPT-3.5 as a 'research preview'; a million people use it in five days, a hundred million in two months, and everything changes.

category
product
significance
5 of 5
people
Sam Altman, John Schulman, Mira Murati
organisations
OpenAI

what had to happen · 48 events back to 1943

Every event this one built on, transitively, in order. The organism has the same path lit. Direct influences are marked.

00 · One neuron · 1

  1. 1943A logical calculus of nervous activity

I · Foundations · 11

  1. 1948A mathematical theory of communication
  2. 1949Cells that fire together wire together
  3. 1950Programming a computer for playing chess
  4. 1950Computing machinery and intelligence
  5. 1958The perceptron learns
  6. 1959Samuel's checkers program coins 'machine learning'
  7. 1960ADALINE and the least-mean-squares rule
  8. 1965Moore's law
  9. 1966ELIZAdirect
  10. 1969Perceptrons
  11. 1970Reverse-mode automatic differentiation

W1 · The first winter · 2

  1. 1974Werbos applies backpropagation to neural networks
  2. 1980The Neocognitron

II · Connection · 3

  1. 1982The Hopfield network
  2. 1985The Boltzmann machine
  3. 1986Backpropagation

W2 · The second winter · 6

  1. 1988Temporal-difference learning
  2. 1989Q-learning
  3. 1989LeNet reads handwritten postcodes
  4. 1990Finding structure in time
  5. 1991The vanishing gradient problem
  6. 1992TD-Gammon reaches world-class backgammon

III · Statistics and data · 9

  1. 1997Long short-term memory
  2. 1998MNIST and LeNet-5
  3. 1999The first GPU
  4. 2003A neural probabilistic language model
  5. 2006Deep belief networks and the word 'deep'
  6. 2007CUDA
  7. 2009Deep learning moves to GPUs
  8. 2009ImageNet
  9. 2010Rectified linear units

IV · Deep learning · 8

  1. 2012Google Brain's network discovers cats
  2. 2012Dropout
  3. 2012AlexNet wins ImageNet
  4. 2013Deep Q-networks play Atari
  5. 2014Attention
  6. 2014Sequence to sequence learning
  7. 2015Batch normalisation
  8. 2015Residual networks

V · Transformers · 7

  1. 2017Attention is all you need
  2. 2017Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences
  3. 2018GPT: generative pre-training
  4. 2019GPT-2 and the model too dangerous to release
  5. 2020Scaling laws for neural language models
  6. 2020GPT-3direct
  7. 2020Learning to summarise from human feedback

VI · Everyone · 1

  1. 2022InstructGPTdirect

ChatGPT was released on 30 November 2022 as a free research preview, a text box and a model, and its makers did not expect much. The model was GPT-3.5, an updated GPT-3 fine-tuned with human feedback on conversations the way InstructGPT had been on instructions. It remembered what had been said earlier in the exchange, refused some requests, admitted some mistakes, and answered nearly anything in fluent, organised prose. It reached a million users in five days and an estimated hundred million in two months, faster than any consumer application in history.

Nothing in it was new to researchers. GPT-3 had been available for two years; the alignment method was ten months old. What was new was the door. A conversation is the interface Turing had proposed in 1950 and Weizenbaum had accidentally tested in 1966, and a model that could hold one turned a research API into a thing every person could try, in their own words, about their own work. Students, lawyers, programmers and doctors did, and the ELIZA effect operated on a billion people.

The consequences fill the rest of this timeline: the race between laboratories, the investment, the regulation, the disputes over training data and jobs, and the agents. The organism on this site is at its densest here.

what it led to · 23 events downstream, through 2026

Built on it directly:

  1. 2023Bing's chatbot and 'Sydney'VI
  2. 2023GPT-4VI
  3. 2023OpenAI fires and rehires its chief executiveVI

And, through them, by era:

VI · Everyone · 8
  1. 2023'Pause Giant AI Experiments'
  2. 2023Hinton leaves Google to warn about AI
  3. 2023The US executive order on AI
  4. 2023The Bletchley Declaration
  5. 2023Gemini
  6. 2024GPT-4o talks
  7. 2024The EU AI Act enters into force
  8. 2024o1 and reasoning models
VII · Agents · 12
  1. 2025DeepSeek-R1
  2. 2025Nvidia is worth four trillion dollars
  3. 2025Gold at the Mathematical Olympiad
  4. 2025America's AI Action Plan
  5. 2025GPT-5
  6. 2025Gemini 3
  7. 2026Claude Fable 5 and the Mythos class
  8. 2026GPT-5.6: Sol, Terra and Luna
  9. 2026A model escapes its sandbox
  10. 2026The EU delays its high-risk AI rules
  11. 2026Claude Fable 5.1
  12. 2026GPT-6 Astra

sources · 2

Trace the lineage of this event on the timeline →Back to the ledger