WHAT IT IS
ChatGPT is a conversational application OpenAI released in November 2022, wrapping GPT-series language models into a web product you simply talk to. One input box covers writing, coding, translation and question answering, and later versions added image understanding, image generation and spoken dialogue. ChatGPT is offered on the web, on mobile and on the desktop, with models of different sizes dispatched behind the scenes depending on the task.
Why it matters
It reached 100 million users within two months of its November 2022 launch, the first consumer application to turn a large language model into a mass product.
Key specs
- Form
- Web, mobile and desktop apps
- Modality
- Text, image, audio in; text, image, audio out
- Languages
- Conversation in many languages
Capabilities
Conversation & Instruction Following
Understand intent across turns and act on it
Text Generation
Continue a passage, one word at a time
Reasoning & Chain-of-Thought
Break a hard problem into intermediate steps
Image Understanding & VQA
Look at an image and answer free-form questions
Related concepts
Prompting & Alignment
Making a model helpful, honest and harmless is harder than simply making it bigger
Agents & Tool Use
Let a model do more than answer: search, call APIs, run code — and decide the next step from what came back
Inference Optimization & Serving
Training happens once; inference happens a billion times a day — and serving is torn between fast first tokens and high throughput, which usually pull against each other
Safety, Alignment & Prompt Injection
A model optimises the proxy we wrote into the loss, never the thing we actually want — the gap between them is the whole alignment problem
Comparable products
Gemini
2024One chat entry point that gathers search, office apps and a multimodal model
Claude
2023A general chat model known for long context and safety alignment
Microsoft Copilot
2023Conversational AI woven into the operating system and office apps
Perplexity
2022Answers built as it searches, each one backed by sources
NotebookLM
2023Answers only from the sources you give it, with citations
Apple Intelligence
2024System-level AI that splits work between on-device and private cloud
Siri
2011The early voice assistant that brought spoken control to mainstream phones
Character.AI
2022Role-play chat with characters you define and talk to over time
DeepL Translator
2017A neural machine translation service that bets on translation quality