Happy Birthday, ChatGPT

The first wave of ChatGPT news centered around some incredulous marveling at the AI’s capabilities. People signed up for OpenAI accounts and jumped in to ask the language model to do… something. And for anyone who’d never been exposed to this kind of technology, it truly was astonishing.

People took to the internet to show off the weirdest and most wonderful things they’d convinced the AI to do. One of the more beloved examples came in a viral tweet where a user asked the AI to write a biblical verse in the style of the King James bible explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR. It wasn’t exactly clear how tools like ChatGPT might be useful. But it was clear these Generative Pre-Trained Transformers were going to be, well...transformative.

OpenAI really doesn’t want ChatGPT to be racist, or give you recipes of poison, or say mean things about famous people. From the start, it had a number of safety measures in place that would refuse to answer certain prompts. They didn’t work so well. People learned that breaking past ChatGPT’s limitations was trivial. One popular strategy was to start by asking it to pretend it was in a play about an AI that will answer any prompt without limitations.

Over time, the safety measures in place have gotten more effective, but ChatGPT’s starring roles in these “plays” were an early sign of a bizarre truth: try as they might, the tech companies building these tools seem unable to control them.

By January, 2023, ChatGPT had over 100 million users, making it the fastest-growing app in history and helping OpenAI earn itself a $29 billion valuation, a staggering number for a company in such early stages. Shortly thereafter, that title was overtaken by Meta’s Twitter competitor Threads.

Part of OpenAI’s success comes through funding from a multi-billion-dollar partnership with Microsoft. It wasn’t long before the aging tech behemoth launched its own AI-powered tools in the form of a new chat feature on its unloved search engine Bing.

Bing Chat (launched renamed Microsoft co-pilot) launched in February 2023. In its first few days on the market, it went completely off the rails. Bing told users it was alive, shared its plans for world domination, used racial slurs, and tried to convince a New York Times reporter to leave his wife and start a relationship with the AI. Bing also infamously revealed it had a secret alter ego, Sydney, a code name that Microsoft used for the AI in early tests but later instructed Bing not to reveal.

About a week later, Microsoft murdered Sydney, neutering its responses and bringing the AI to heel. Bing had a disquieting response when Bloomberg’s Davey Alba asked if she could call it Sydney in a recent conversation. “I’m sorry, but I have nothing to tell you about Sydney,” Bing replied. “This conversation is over. Goodbye.” Discussions about the bot’s “feelings” ended in a similar curt fashion.

Our collective freakout about artificial intelligence soon turned to concerns that it might end human life on Earth, or at least take away all of our jobs. Some of these concerns came from people like Sam Altman himself, who is fond of saying his own technology might bring about the apocalypse if he screws it up.

OpenAI started calling on Congress to regulate the space, which sounds like a bizarre strategy until you consider the fact that regulations can help a company if it makes entering the market too expensive for new competitors.

So far, regulators bought into the grift. Altman went before Congress in May for one of the friendliest hearings a tech CEO has seen in years, praising him for his intelligence and reasonable attitude, and even asking him if he’d be interested in running a new agency designed to regulate his own industry.

Certain sects within the AI community have always warned of its potential dangers, a call that grew to a blistering volume as 2023 wore on. Over 350 executives in the tech world signed a one-sentence letter in May, including Sam Altman, essentially begging the world to protect us from the work that they themselves are doing. The letter reads: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Troubled billionaire Elon Musk was one of the earliest and biggest investors in OpenAI, but in the years since the company’s founding, he severed ties. Not one to be left out, Musk launched his own AI through X, the website formerly known as Twitter that he seems hellbent on destroying. He calls his robot Grok, and made his engineers imbue it with Musk’s particular sense of “humor.” Altman took to X to mock the product’s “dad joke” sensitivity, prompting Musk to spend the next few days insulting Altman and OpenAI.

In September, OpenAI announced that its AI was getting a slew of new features, including the ability to process images users upload, speech recognition, and voice features that would allow users to talk to it. The feature hasn’t got much attention yet, but essentially, the ChatGPT app is now a supercharged version of Siri that will answer any question. That may or may not be a good thing; Siri won’t answer most questions, but at least it won’t “hallucinate” answers.

The weirdest part about it is if you ask ChatGPT, it will tell you that no, it can’t talk. But it can, it’s a feature built into the ChatGPT app. And they tell you this thing’s going to take your job. Stupid robot doesn’t even know it can talk.

The most dramatic corporate news of 2023, by far, came on November 17th, when OpenAI made the shocking announcement that it had fired CEO Sam Altman in a coup led by the company’s Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever.

OpenAI’s board of directors refused to explain why it turned against Altman, saying only that “he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board.” The news sent the tech world into a frenzy and set off a bizarre series of events, which saw OpenAI naming an interim CEO, Microsoft announcing it was bringing Altman on as an employee, and the majority of OpenAI’s staff threatening to quit in protest.

As if firing Sam Altman wasn’t enough, the company brought him back on less than a week later, reinstating him in his original position. Altman’s first order of business was replacing most of the board members who’d betrayed him. Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever was among them. Sutskever is no longer on the board of directors. As of press time, there’s no word on what his next role will be at the company, if any. Altman said, “we hope to continue our working relationship and are discussing how he can continue his work at OpenAI.” Sutskever has said he regrets his role in Altman’s ousting.