Originally published 3.29.23

Just a few short months ago, the most advanced AI chatbot available to the public was CleverBot, an AI that would turn out responses closely related to what was inputted without adding much to the conversation. Today, a simple one-sentence prompt can turn out anything from an Olive Garden ad script to an essay nearly fit for turn-in.

Launching on Nov. 30, 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT rose from zero daily active users to over a million by Dec. 4, 2022. This prompted other tech giants like Microsoft’s Bing division and Google to put out Bing AI and Google Bard on Feb. 7 and Feb. 6, respectively.

How we got here

First released to the public as ChatGPT 3.5, this version was built on 175 billion parameters, or data points, to turn out answers to the public’s queries. This version was able to take text-only inputs of 3,000 words and respond with text of limited length. It could also receive passable grades on law, business, medical and other college-level exams.

In just three and a half months, OpenAI released ChatGPT 4. This version is able to accept 25,000 word inputs and utilize a trillion parameters to generate your answer. But most importantly, it’s now able to accept inputs like images and sounds. These advancements took the AI language model from just passable with the aforementioned tests to landing it near the top. Remember, this happened in just under four months and still remains at no cost to the personal end-user.