'Didn't think it would be a phenomenon': OpenAI founder Sam Altman recounts Day 1 of rolling out ChatGPT

OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman did not anticipate ChatGPT would become a rage in such a short period even though he knew the potential of the AI platform. In a recent interaction with Shopify founder and CEO Tobias Lutke, the OpenAI boss recounted Day 1 of rolling out ChatGPT. He said the OpenAI team wasn't initially sure how people would respond to the product.

"There were a lot of different opinions inside the company. We knew it was good, we wanted to release it because we thought it was good," Altman said during a recent public fireside chat in Toronto, organised by a Canadian non-profit organisation Elevate.

Altman revealed the idea was to launch ChatGPT gradually and take feedback from users. He had imagined ChatGPT 4 would be the product that would capture the world's imagination but ChatGPT 3.5 was able to do so even before ChatGPT4 was released.  

"We certainly didn't think it was going to be sort of the phenomenon that it turned out to be. We thought that would come when we released GPT-4 several months later. So, we woke up that morning like we'd released many other products and put it out there, and we were like, we hope people like it. People did like it, people did like it," Altman said.

As the day progressed, Altman began to realise that it was beginning to pique the attention of not just tech geeks but also regular folks.

"I would say by two o'clock that afternoon, it was clear that something big was about to happen. It wasn't clear exactly how big because you always start with the tech hyper-early adopter crew, but they were so excited about it, they were telling their friends. By afternoon, I was starting to hear from people who don't normally follow tech: 'I saw this thing, it sounds wild, like, can you let me try it out or how do I do this?'," Altman recounted.

OpenAI amassed a massive five million users in just five days after the launch. Altman said he did not expect this kind of growth.

"Well, no one would expect the speed of growth because it hadn't happened. You caught lightning in a bottle there," he said.

Altman says he has been amazed at how people are using ChatGPT. "It's just incredible what people are doing and what people are finding, and the kind of creative power of humanity that these tools are going to, that already are unleashing. It's wild to watch," he said.

Altman also compared the emergence of artificial intelligence to man landing on the moon.

"We, not OpenAI, but we, humanity, it's been this culmination. I think we should be collectively as proud of this as we were for the moon landing. After decades, centuries of scientific and technological progress, we have figured out a computer algorithm that can really, truly, with no tricks, no sleight of hand, it can actually learn," Altman said.

OpenAI rolled out a large language model GPT-3 in 2022, but the big impact came with the early demo of ChatGPT (based on GPT-3.5) which it showcased on November 30, 2022. Soon after, OpenAI released a paid version of ChatGPT known as ChatGPT Plus, which also gave users access to a more advanced GPT-4.

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