The LLM & agent era
How did ChatGPT turn language models into something everyone could use?
ChatGPT put a language model behind a simple chat box and tuned it to follow instructions and hold a conversation. It reached 100 million users in two months and set the format most people now expect.
The raw few-shot ability of large models was powerful but awkward to use. You had to write careful prompts, and the model would happily continue text rather than answer you. ChatGPT, launched by OpenAI on November 30, 2022, removed that friction. It put a model behind a plain chat box, where you type a question and get a reply, and it can take follow-ups in the same conversation.[1]
The interface was the small part. The bigger change was tuning the model to behave like an assistant. ChatGPT was built on a model in the GPT-3.5 family and fine-tuned with supervised learning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), the same approach used for OpenAI’s earlier InstructGPT. Human trainers showed good responses and ranked the model’s answers, and those rankings trained a reward signal that nudged the model toward being more helpful and following instructions.[1]
The reaction was immediate. ChatGPT gained a million users in five days and reached 100 million in two months, making it the fastest-growing internet application in history at the time.[1] For most people this was their first hands-on contact with a large language model, and the chat box became the format they came to expect.
References
- ChatGPT — Wikipedia