Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Beijing, February 5 (Xinhua) according to people familiar with the matter, ChatGPT, the world's popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, is actually an old version and launched in a hurry, and its popularity was not even expected by its developer OpenAI himself.

Emergency release of the old version one day in mid-November last year, OpenAI employees were given an unexpected task: to release a chat robot, and quickly.

A senior OpenAI executive announced that GPT-3.5 chat Robot (Chat with GPT-3.5) will be available to the public free of charge in two weeks' time.

The news baffled some OpenAI employees. The San Francisco AI company has been working on the release of GPT-4 for a whole year. This is a new AI model that excels in writing articles and solving complex coding problems. After months of testing and fine-tuning, GPT-4 is almost ready. According to three people familiar with OpenAI's internal operations, the company's plan is to release the model and some chatbots in early 2023 for users to try.

But OpenAI executives changed their minds. According to people familiar with OpenAI, some senior officials are worried that competitors may release their own AI chat robots ahead of GPT-4 and steal their thunder. They believe that using the old model to launch new products quickly can help them collect feedback to improve the new model.

So they decided to take out an old product that had not been used for a long time and update an unreleased chat robot, using an enhanced version of GPT-3. GPT-3 is the company's previous language model, which will be launched in 2020.

Thirteen days later, ChatGPT was born.

ChatGPT has become a global phenomenon in a few months since its debut. Millions of people use it to write poems, develop applications and provide temporary psychotherapy. It has been accepted by news publishers, marketing companies and business leaders (with mixed results), triggering investors trying to join the next AI boom.

Within OpenAI, ChatGPT has always been a big surprise, but the success of overnight fame creates both opportunities and headaches. Before the launch of ChatGPT, some OpenAI employees were skeptical about the success of the project. After all, BlenderBot, an AI chat robot released by Meta, the parent company of Facebook, failed a few months ago, and another AI project, Galactica, was halted just three days later. Some employees, numbed by daily exposure to state-of-the-art AI systems, think that a chat robot based on a two-year-old AI model might look boring.

But two months after its launch, ChatGPT has amassed more than 30 million users and about 5m visitors a day, according to two people familiar with the matter. This makes it one of the fastest growing software products in memory. By contrast, it took Instagram nearly a year to get its first 10 million users.

OpenAI CEO Altman's growth also poses challenges. Due to the lack of processing performance, ChatGPT often goes down, and users have found some ways to bypass the safety functions of the robot. The hype around ChatGPT has also angered competitors of some big technology companies. They point out that, strictly speaking, the underlying technology of ChatGPT is not new.

ChatGPT is also a bottomless pit of money at the moment. OpenAI CEO Sam Sam Altman tweeted that there were no ads on ChatGPT and that the average cost per conversation on processing power was less than 10 cents, which could be as high as millions of dollars a week. To offset the cost, the company announced this week that it would start selling its $20-a-month subscription service, ChatGPT Plus.

Rivals are worried that despite its limitations, ChatGPT's success has made OpenAI one of Silicon Valley's most powerful companies, putting pressure on other giants.

Microsoft recently reached a $10 billion investment deal with OpenAI, which plans to integrate the startup's technology into its Bing search engine and other products. At the same time, Google sounded the "red alert" in response to ChatGPT, quickly following up on many of its AI products in an attempt to catch up. In addition to Silicon Valley, Chinese search company Baidu is preparing to launch a ChatGPT-like chat robot in March, which will initially be integrated into the main search service.

OpenAI plans to launch the GPT-4 model this year. At that point, its capabilities may make ChatGPT seem odd. Now that people are adapting to a new and powerful AI tool, the next one may not seem so shocking.

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