Today (Nov. 30) marks the one-year anniversary of the public release of ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that has taken the tech world by storm. It has been a fruitful yet chaotic year for ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI, which saw its market value skyrocket but its leadership team, centered around cofounder and CEO Sam Altman, increasingly tested as they divide on the direction of A.I. advancement.
ChatGPT evangelized the term “generative A.I.,” which describes applications that can generate text, images and other content based on simple prompts. Over the past 12 months, ChatGPT spurred a slew of competing chatbots, including Google’s Bard, Anthropic’s Claude and Elon Musk’s Grok. Its own A.I. capabilities improved rapidly, too, with the upgrades from GPT-3 large language model to GPT 3.5, released in January, and GPT-4, released in March and now available through a paid subscription.
Today, ChatGPT and alternative text and image generators are used on a daily basis by marketers, consultants, computer programmers, writers, students and many more. According to a recent survey by Statista, roughly one in ten business leaders in the U.S. have saved over $100,000 since introducing ChatGPT to their workflow and around a quarter of companies have saved $50,000 to $70,000 by using the chatbot.
Top statistics showing the meteoric rise of ChatGPT and OpenAI:
- ChatGPT was an overnight success, attracting one million users in the first five days of its launch, according to Sam Altman.
- Today, the chatbot has more than 100 million users.
- OpenAI’s website is visited more than 1.5 billion times every month, according to SimilarWeb data as of September.
- Nearly half of Americans have heard about ChatGPT, according to a recent poll by YouGov.
- In February 2023, OpenAI released ChatGPT Plus at $20 per month. Plus users can access GPT-4, while the free version of ChatGPT is powered by GPT-3.5.
- OpenAI is valued by private investors at up to $90 billion. That’s nearly 35 times what the company was worth two years ago.
- OpenAI’s headcount has more than doubled since launching ChatGPT. Currently it employs about 770.
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Leadership upheaval and the concerning future of A.I.
Last week, OpenAI’s board of director voted to fire Altman as both CEO and a board member. The surprise announcement sent OpenAI into chaos, pushing the company to the brink of collapse. Within days, more than 90 percent of OpenAI’s 770 employees signed a pledge, threatening to quit unless Altman returns. The company’s cofounder and president Greg Brockman, who was also fired from the board but allowed to stay on the executive team, took Altman’s side and resigned. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s largest investor, Microsoft (MSFT), quickly offered Altman and Brockman jobs to start a new A.I. research lab within the company.
Facing an imminent employee exodus, OpenAI’s board engaged Altman in a discussion about his potential return. After a weekend of intense negotiation among board members, investors and Altman himself, OpenAI agreed to bring Altman back as CEO and form a new board. Brockman agreed to return as president as well, but neither he nor Altman got their board seats back.
OpenAI’s new board consists of Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, former Twitter chairman Bret Taylor and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Only D’Angelo was an existing member. His three peer directors—OpenAI’s chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner—were ousted at the end of the negotiation.
The new board is chaired by Taylor, with the possibility to add more directors, including Altman himself. “We are collaborating to figure out the details,” OpenAI said in an X post Nov. 22.