ChatGPT had its public launch last week. And it immediately went viral. Within 5 days the artificial intelligence system accumulated a record-breaking 1 million users.

To put it in perspective it took platforms like Facebook, Spotify, and Twitter months to achieve this number of users.

The free-to-use version created by OpenAI was released to the public. And it was so popular that the download link was overwhelmed and had to be shut down temporarily.

The link on the OpenAI website is up and working again.

Musk and OpenAI 

The San Francisco-based company OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Elon Musk and other wealthy entrepreneurs who collectively pledged $1 billion to the venture. 

OpenAI was founded in 2015 by a group of investors, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba.

 The company’s stated goal was to advance digital intelligence in a way that is safe and beneficial for humanity. Over the years, OpenAI has received additional funding from a variety of investors, including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Y Combinator.

Sam Altman is the CEO. Musk remained a donor when he resigned from the OpenAI board in February 2018. Around the same time, he purchased Neuralink which is working on a brain-computer interface system.

ChatGPT machine learning-based tech

 ChatGPT is a large language model, trained on a massive amount of text and voice data. It is based on the machine learning technique known as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). RLHF is effective in generating human-like text responses to a given prompt.

Initial development involved human AI trainers providing the model with conversations in which they played both sides — the user and an AI assistant.

The technology has real-world applications such as digital marketing, online content creation, answering customer service queries, or even aiding in debugging code.

Despite the recent glitches in the US economy, last year Venture capital investment in AI development and companies rose to nearly $13 billion. And by October 2023, $6 billion in investment money continues to drive AI.

 Google has a similar AI chatbot in development through a company they own called DeepMind. It is known as the LaMDA aka Language Model for Dialogue Applications chatbot. 

Facebook/Meta and Microsoft are also developing AI chatbots.

Testing

On Saturday there were times when the system appeared to be overloaded with the influx of user questions. We did a test and got the responses below.